The next four hairdo members unseat for a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station flew to the Kennedy Space Center Sunday to prepare for launch early Friday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli, the Crew-7 commander, European Space Organ astronaut Andreas Mogensen, Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and Russian spaceman Konstantin Borisov landed at the old space shuttle runway virtually noon EDT without a flight from the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“You can probably tell from the huge smiles on our faces that we’re extremely excited to finally be here at Kennedy Space Center and for the journey we’re well-nigh to embark on,” said Moghbeli, a Marine Corps helicopter test pilot and mother of two-and-a-half-year-old twin girls.
Moghbeli and her crewmates plan to strap into their Hairdo Dragon sheathing “Endurance” at historic pad 39A early Tuesday for a dress-rehearsal countdown. Once well-constructed and the hairdo is out of the spacecraft, SpaceX plans to test fire the first stage’s nine Merlin engines to verify the booster’s readiness for its first flight.
Assuming no problems yield up and the weather cooperates, the hairdo will strap in for real Friday morning virtually 1:15 a.m. for a launch at 3:49 a.m. Moghbeli and Mogensen will monitor a series of streamlined rendezvous maneuvers leading to a docking at the space station just without 2 a.m. Saturday.
“This is our seventh operational mission to the International Space Station under the Commercial Hairdo Program,” said Kennedy Space Center Director Janet Petro. “And plane though we have a robust manifest here, we are unchangingly super excited when we’re going to stick a human on the rocket. (It) unchangingly ups the level of excitement.”
Borisov and Moghbeli, a Marine lieutenant colonel with increasingly than 150 gainsay missions to her credit, are making their first spaceflight. Mogensen visited the space station for nine days in 2015 as part of a short-duration Russian Soyuz swap-out flight while Furukawa logged 167 days aboard the outpost in 2011.
Borisov is the third Russian to fly aboard a SpaceX Hairdo Dragon as part of an try-on between NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian federal space agency, to launch one NASA astronaut aboard each Soyuz flight to the station and one spaceman aboard each ISS-bound Hairdo Dragon.
The try-on ensures at least one hairdo member from each country is unchangingly aboard the station plane if an emergency of some sort forced a Soyuz or Hairdo Dragon to depart early.
“If overly you’ve seen the vestige of this stuff an international program, you’re seeing it today with this crew,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who welcomed the Crew-7 fliers to Florida. “Of all crews, this is the most international that we’ve had, and I think it shows the unrestrictedness of the cooperation virtually the globe.”
Said Borisov: “I’m honored to be part of the … most international hairdo ever. Experienced astronauts and cosmonauts, they say that when you go to the ISS and you squint at the planet, you see that there are no borders. And really, I want to protract and to convey that feeling and that emotion and moreover to support the cooperation which we have been having so far.”
