Launch time tonight professional#

In a press conference earlier this week, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager described the Inspiration mission as a “gift” because it brought issues with a key component on the Crew Dragon spacecraft - the toilet - into the spotlight so the problem could be fixed for future NASA missions.

Launch time tonight professional#

That mission carried four people, none of whom were professional astronauts, on a three-day space flight that orbited higher than any spacecraft has traveled since the moon missions of the 1970s. In fact, the four professional astronauts on the Crew-3 mission -NASA’s Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, as well as the European Space Agency’s Matthias Maurer - will be the first to board a Crew Dragon since SpaceX’s Inspiration4 all-civilian tourist mission. The company still owns and operates the vehicle and NASA is considered just another customer for these missions. That’s something NASA has wanted to have more control over since its Space Shuttle program retired in 2011, leaving Russia as the only country with the ability to provide ISS transportation.īut SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is far from another space shuttle. This mission, called Crew-3, is the fourth mission in a partnership between SpaceX and NASA to make routine trips to the ISS in order to keep the 21-year-old space station adequately staffed. The astronauts will spend the next day strapped inside their spacecraft as it maneuvers through orbit and prepares to link up with the ISS, which orbits more than 200 miles above Earth’s surface.ĭocking is scheduled for 7:10 pm ET Thursday. The spacecraft, with three NASA astronauts and one European astronaut onboard, will spend all day Wednesday maneuvering closer to the International Space Station (ISS), where it’ll dock late Thursday kicking off a six-month science and research mission.