SpaceX Crew-11 set for launch to ISS
July 31 (UPI) -- SpaceX's Crew-11 is set to launch from Florida to the International Space Station on Thursday afternoon.
The mission is scheduled for 12:09 p.m. EDT from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center aboard a Falcon 9 Rocket.
"I'm so eager to see this mission launch, but as always, we launch when we're ready. With a little luck, we'll see a launch soon, and we'll also see a crew come home soon," said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate, during a prelaunch briefing. "But be patient with us. Let's make sure that the vehicle is ready to go and that our team is really certain before we hit the button."
Crew-11 astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui and Oleg Platonov will take 39 hours to reach the ISS. Arrival time is estimated at 3 a.m. on Aug 2.
"We'll watch that time closely. We have a limit of about 40 hours or so of ability to sustain the crew on the way to station when we protect all the consumables for contingencies. So, we'll watch that really carefully," said Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
Cardman, commander of Crew-11 in a press briefing said six-month stays on the ISS will help prepare NASA to send astronauts much deeper into space.
"Understanding how to live and work for long durations -- going and staying -- is a really interesting challenge, and I'm grateful that we've gotten the chance to do this -- to hone our skills on the ISS, so that we can do this for longer durations on the moon," Cardman said.
According to NASA there is a full schedule of experiments and maintenance tasks when the crew is on the ISS. They will investigate the additive manufacturing process for small metal parts in microgravity and will look at physiological and psychological changes that happen across mission durations to prepare for a three-year journey to Mars.
"This studies how astronauts adapt to space over different mission durations, integrating multidisciplinary research to assess physiological and psychological changes that develop and really to develop those countermeasures that are critical for us to go to the longer-duration missions, like a three-year mission to Mars, if you can imagine," Spetch said during the press conference.
Crew-10 and Crew-11 will be working together before the Crew-10 team returns to Earth on Aug 6.
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