SpaceX launch of crew on first 'operational' mission delayed by weather

  • 11/14/2020
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA and high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX announced on Friday a 24-hour weather delay of their planned launch of four astronauts into orbit for NASA’s first full-fledged human mission using a privately owned spacecraft.The liftoff time slipped from Saturday to Sunday evening due to forecasts of gusty, onshore winds over Florida - remnants of Tropical Storm Eta - that would have made a return landing for the Falcon 9 rocket’s reusable booster stage difficult, NASA officials said. SpaceX’s newly designed Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed “Resilience” by its crew, was rescheduled for launch atop the Falcon 9 at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday (0027 GMT on Monday) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The crew for the flight to the International Space Station includes three American astronauts - Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and the mission commander, Mike Hopkins, a U.S. Air Force colonel who is to be sworn into the fledgling U.S. Space Force once aboard the orbiting laboratory. The fourth crew member is Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, making his third trip to orbit after flying on the U.S. space shuttle in 2005 and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2009. The journey to the space station - lengthened from about eight hours to a little over a day by the new launch time - is considered SpaceX’s first “operational” mission for the Crew Dragon.

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