CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The rocket launch taking Spokane astronaut Anne McClain and her fellow crew members to the International Space Station is moving forward as scheduled, pending the resolution of some technical issues, officials say.
NASA and SpaceX officials convened Friday for a pre-launch debriefing to share insight into the planning and preparation for the mission, while also touching on “late-breaking issues,” NASA associate administrator Ken Bowersox said.
Bowersox tipped his cap to the SpaceX team.
“They’ve been very flexible with us over the last couple years, coming up with new ways to handle almost anything that comes our way on the International Space Station,” he said.
McClain and her crewmates are expected to take off at 4:48 p.m. PT Wednesday from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center. The mission is the 10th crew exchange with SpaceX through the space agency’s commercial crew program, in which the agency partners with corporations in order to make the staffing of the space lab more efficient, the agency states.
NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov and Takuya Onishi, an astronaut with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will join McClain on the mission. The crew will be riding in the SpaceX Dragon capsule “Endurance,” previously used by other crews.
The capsule will be propelled by a SpaceX Falcon 9, a semi-reusable, two-stage rocket designed to lift off from the launching pad and return to earth to be reused. The Falcon is expected to return around 3 a.m. PT Thursday.
Bowersox said the partnership with SpaceX has changed how the space agency views what may be a safe vehicle to transport its astronauts. Just 10 years ago, NASA believed that each rig should be built from scratch.
Steve Stitch, manager of the commercial crew program, said two issues were discussed during Friday’s flight-readiness review. The coating on one of the thrusters for the latter stage of propulsion has degraded over repeated use, and both the agency and SpaceX are hoping to have a better understanding of an engine fire that broke out within a Falcon 9 rocket that launched 21 Starlink satellites in early March.