SpaceX Crew-7 Launch

SCANALYZER The Happening World
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NASA’s Crew-7 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to launch on 2023-08-26 at 07:27 UTC. The mission will take four crew, one from NASA, one from Russia’s Roscosmos, one from the European Space Agency, and one from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), to the station for a six month stay. They will fly to the ISS in Crew Dragon vehicle Endurance, which previously flew to and from the ISS on the Crew-3 and Crew-5 missions. The first stage booster, B1081, is new and will be making its first flight. Weather is forecast as 95% favourable for launch.

This will be the 250th launch of a Falcon 9, and the 11th SpaceX crewed launch. The first stage booster will return to land at Landing Zone 1 near the launch site.

Here is a pre-flight preview from Everyday Astronaut.

This is the NASA SpaceX Crew-7 Launch Readiness Review media teleconference, held on the evening of 2023-08-21.

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NASA has announced a one day delay in the planned launch of Crew-7, “Crew-7 Targets Saturday Launch to Space Station”.

Mission managers met on Thursday to discuss the status toward final readiness for a Friday launch opportunity. After performing an extra data review, teams decided to take additional time to reconfirm required factors of safety and operational margin on one of the Dragon spacecraft’s environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) components. The new launch date provides teams additional time to complete the analysis and thoroughly review the necessary data ahead of launch. All ECLSS valves on the Crew-7 and Crew-6 Dragon spacecraft are performing normally, and performed as expected in all preflight testing. Safety continues to be the team’s top priority. The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft remain healthy as teams complete and discuss the final results of this additional analysis, and the crew is ready to fly when the entire team is ready.

The launch is now scheduled for 2023-08-26 at 07:27 UTC. I have updated the main post accordingly.

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Here is the post-launch news conference for Crew-7 held on 2023-08-26.

Participants were:

  • Ken Bowersox, associate administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
  • Steve Stich, manager, Commercial Crew Program, Kennedy
  • Joel Montalbano, manager, International Space Station Program, Johnson
  • Sarah Walker, director, Dragon Mission Management, SpaceX
  • Hiroshi Sasaki, vice president, JAXA
  • Josef Aschbacher, director general, ESA
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Here is the live Webcast of the Crew-7 approach and docking to the International Space Station. Docking is scheduled for around 12:39 UTC on 2023-08-27 with hatch opening an hour or so after the docking. The official welcome on-board and remarks by the space station crew is scheduled for 15:30 UTC.

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Return 2024-03-11 15:05 UTC undock scheduled:

SpaceX and NASA are targeting no earlier than Monday, March 11 at 11:05 a.m. ET for Dragon to autonomously undock from the International Space Station. After performing a series of departure burns to move away from the space station, Dragon will conduct multiple orbit-lowering maneuvers, jettison the trunk, and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere for splashdown off the coast of Florida almost 19 hours later at approximately 5:50 a.m. ET on Tuesday, March 12.

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