According to NASA, on Wednesday, January 31, 2024, Crew-8 will launch on February 22 and bring four passengers to the International Space Station for a six-month stay.
If the launch doesn’t occur in February, March represents the next window of opportunity.
Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida will see the launch of Crew-8’s Crew Dragon capsule atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Russian space agency Roscosmos’ Alexander Grebenkin will travel on the Dragon with NASA’s Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps.
Barratt is the pilot, and Dominick will oversee Crew 8. As mission specialists, Epps and Grebenkin will work together.
The Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour, which has completed four human missions to the International Space Station, will be used by Crew-8. Additionally, the spaceship conducted SpaceX’s first-ever crewed flight, the Demo-2 test mission in 2020, Crew-2, Crew-6, and the private Ax-1 trip in April 2022.
On the other hand, the Falcon 9 rocket of Crew-8 will be taking its inaugural flight.
On Wednesday, NASA officials provided an update: “The booster recently completed stage testing and will undergo final assembly in the SpaceX hangar at Launch Complex 39A ahead of the Dragon and Falcon 9 mates.” “Once all rocket and spacecraft system checkouts are complete, the integrated stack will be rolled to the pad and raised to vertical for a static fire test before launch.”
Before Crew-8 takes off from Pad 39A, another SpaceX mission, IM-1, is slated to take off. This is the first flight of Intuitive Machines’ robotic Nova-C moonlander.
If all goes as planned, IM-1 will launch atop a Falcon 9 during a three-day window in mid-February. Houston-based intuitive machines and SpaceX. A lunar landing attempt will be made on February 22, the day Crew-8 is scheduled to launch, after any launch during the window.
Crew-8, as its name implies, is SpaceX‘s eighth operational astronaut trip to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. The most recent, Crew-7, will return to Earth a few weeks after arriving at the orbiting lab last August.
In August, provided everything goes as planned, NASA recently disclosed the members of Crew 9.
On January 31, the robotic Nova-C spacecraft, created by Intuitive Machines, was placed within the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Six NASA sensors are on board the Nova-C lander, Odysseus.
The US space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, or CLPS, is used for this.
The Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, or CLPS, of the US Space Agency is used for this.
To assist in gathering data for science, CLPS intends to deploy private spacecraft and landers.
In the long run, experts believe this will open the door for more permanent human habitation on the moon.
According to Space.com, NASA’s equipment on board includes a new kind of “space-age fuel gauge,” a video system, and a laser-based descent and landing sensor.
As the name implies, the fuel gauge will use sensors to determine how much propellant is left in the lander’s tanks.