CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX and NASA officials are feeling good about tomorrow morning's launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), provided Mother Nature cooperates.
Crew-13 is scheduled to lift off Thursday (Oct. 1) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex-40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). The mission is targeting an instantaneous launch window at 11:10 a.m. EDT (1510 GMT), with docking planned for just under eight hours later. You can watch all of the action here at Space.com when the time comes.
And all of the hardware is ready for an on-time launch, we learned today (Sept. 30).
"Right now, everything is 'go,'" Lori Glaze, associate administrator for NASA's Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate, said during a prelaunch press briefing this evening.
But the weather has to be good as well, she added — and that's not a sure thing. Current forecasts predict a 45% chance of a weather violation, meaning there's a 55% chance the mission will get the green light for liftoff.
When Crew-13 launches, SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule "Grace" will ferry the astronauts to low Earth orbit (LEO), led by commander Jessica Watkins, who is poised to become the first NASA astronaut to launch aboard a Crew Dragon for a second time. Her three crewmates, all astronaut rookies, are NASA's Luke Delaney (Crew-13 pilot), Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The latter two serve as mission specialists.
The Crew-13 astronauts will live and work aboard the ISS for roughly six months as part of ISS Expedition 75. During their time on orbit, they will continue regular station upkeep and maintenance and contribute to a range of ongoing research experiments and scientific studies.
Many on-orbit investigations are focused on astronaut health and examining the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body, which can have rippling effects for medical innovations back on Earth. Crew-13 will also conduct trials to better understand in-space food production.
"The crew will help researchers treat heart disease and Parkinson's disease by studying human stem-cell derived tissues that can help improve medicine, disease modeling and pharmaceutical testing," said Dana Weigel, NASA's LEO program manager, in a Sept. 28 NASA statement.
"They also will explore crop production, which is important for longer-duration spaceflight missions, help us better understand blood flow abnormalities that we see in space and test new diagnostic medical equipment for monitoring crew health," she added.
Crew-13's arrival at the orbital laboratory will also signal the beginning of the end of the Crew-12 mission. SpaceX launched Crew-12 in February, and those four astronauts have been wrapping up their time on the ISS as their mission has approached its conclusion. They ended up having a couple of extra weeks in space: Crew-13 had been targeted to launch on Sept. 12, but a leak in Grace's propulsion system, discovered during pre-mission checkouts, pushed the launch back. Now, mission managers and officials at NASA and SpaceX have cleared Grace for flight.
If Thursday's launch is scrubbed due to weather or other delays, a backup opportunity exists on Friday (Oct. 2), with a liftoff that day scheduled for 10:47 a.m. EDT (1447 GMT).
