SpaceX and NASA are checking off boxes ahead of the corporate’s next crewed launch to the International Space Station, which is scheduled for Friday (Aug. 25).
The 4 astronauts of that mission, which is known as Crew-7, together with their associated SpaceX and NASA teams, have “accomplished a full rehearsal of launch day activities,” SpaceX wrote via X (formerly Twitter) early Tuesday morning (Aug. 22).
That post featured three photos: One showed the spaceflyers inside their Crew Dragon capsule Endurance, which is sitting atop a Falcon 9 rocket at Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. One other saw the crew in front of the Falcon 9-Endurance stack on the pad, and the third was taken in Pad 39A’s crew access arm, the entry point into Endurance.
And, in one other Tuesday morning X post, SpaceX announced that it had conducted a successful “static fire” test of Crew-7’s Falcon 9. (In static fires, a rocket’s first-stage engines are briefly ignited while the vehicle stays anchored to the bottom.)
So all the things stays heading in the right direction for a Crew-7 liftoff from Pad 39A on Friday at 3:49 a.m. EDT (0749 GMT). You possibly can watch the launch live here at Space.com when the time comes.
Crew-7 will send 4 spaceflyers to the International Space Station (ISS) for a roughly six-month stay.
Those 4 astronauts are NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli, the Crew-7 commander; Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency, who will function pilot; and mission specialists Konstantin Borisov and Satoshi Furukawa, of the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, respectively.
One other Crew Dragon capsule is already docked to the ISS — Endeavour, which flew 4 astronauts up on SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission. The Crew-6 quartet will depart for Earth about five days after Crew-7 docks, a milestone scheduled to occur roughly 24 hours after launch.
And the ISS will get one other visitor before Crew-7 lifts off, if all goes in response to plan. A robotic Russian Progress cargo craft is scheduled to launch Tuesday evening and arrive on the orbiting lab late Thursday night (Aug. 24).