WASHINGTON — SpaceX and Axiom Space could have only two opportunities this month to launch a non-public astronaut mission to the International Space Station before having to attend potentially several months before getting one other shot.
At a May 15 briefing, officials from the 2 firms in addition to NASA announced they’d accomplished a flight readiness review for the Ax-2 mission to the station, giving their approval to proceed with a May 21 launch. Liftoff of the Falcon 9 carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft is scheduled for five:37 p.m. Eastern that day, establishing a docking May 22 at 9:30 a.m. Eastern.
That’s the first of two launch opportunities for the mission, with a backup launch date May 22. NASA officials said on the decision that if the mission doesn’t launch by May 22, they’d should wait until after a number of other missions scheduled to launch to the station.
“If we don’t get off by the twenty second, we’ll stand down with the Axiom 2 mission and switch our focus to the SpaceX-28 mission,” said Joel Montalbano, NASA ISS program manager, referring to a cargo Dragon mission currently scheduled to launch June 3. “Axiom, NASA and SpaceX will get together and search for the following best opportunity.”
That next best opportunity could possibly be months away. The present ISS manifest calls for the SpaceX cargo mission launching June 3 and remaining on the station a few month. It should be followed by the primary crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, which Montalbano said stays on the right track for a July 21 launch. The subsequent crew rotation mission, Crew-7, is slated for later this summer, he added.
The organizations will even should work around use of Launch Complex 39A for other missions. That pad is the one one which can support each Dragon missions in addition to Falcon Heavy launches. Current manifests call for a Falcon Heavy launch for the U.S. Space Force in July, one other for EchoStar’s Jupiter-3 communications satellite in August, and NASA’s Psyche mission in October, which has a narrow launch window to succeed in its asteroid destination.
Delays in one other Falcon Heavy launch created the scheduled crunch for Ax-2. A Falcon Heavy launched Viasat’s ViaSat-3 Americas satellite April 30 after nearly two weeks of delays attributable to poor weather and technical issues. That delayed Ax-2, which had been scheduled to launch May 8.
The delay will even condense the Ax-2 mission. Axiom Space originally planned to have the Dragon docked to the ISS for 10 days, but on the May 21 briefing officials disclosed that it had been shortened to eight days.
“With the intention to make the mission fit throughout the flow of activities that ISS has lined up, we made the joint decision to cut back the docked time to eight days,” said Derek Hassmann, chief of mission integration and operations at Axiom Space.
He said the corporate went through the activities planned for the mission and prioritized them, elevating research the four-person crew planned to conduct. “Ultimately, there was no impact to the research objectives,” he said. “There was some media outreach and other things that we desired to do but weren’t a high priority that were dropped.”
He noted later within the briefing, though, that the 2 astronauts from Saudi Arabia on Ax-2, Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi, still had a “whole series of media events” scheduled in the course of the flight, particularly with students. They might be joined on the mission by commander Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut, and John Shoffner, an American private astronaut who will function pilot of Ax-2.
There aren’t any technical issues that may preclude a May 21 launch, said Bill Gerstenmaier, vice chairman of construct and flight reliability at SpaceX. The schedule calls for a “dry dress” rehearsal with the crew on May 19, followed by a static-fire test of the Falcon 9.
The launch might be the primary crewed mission to try a booster landing back at Cape Canaveral’s Landing Zone 1, the previous Launch Complex 13, slightly than on a droneship within the Atlantic Ocean. “That was made available because we now have a little bit bit of additional Falcon performance,” he said. That’s preferred to a droneship landing because it removes weather conditions on the droneship as a launch constraint and makes it easier to get the booster ready for its next launch.
That extra performance emerged from the experience of launching Starlink satellites. “We’ve at all times had this sort of capability before. We just weren’t sure we’d at all times get the performance,” he explained. “The variety of Falcon flights we’ve flown have allowed us to say that performance is obtainable and could be used where it’s needed for use.” Returning the booster to the Cape might be standard on all future crewed launches, he added.