Four crew members of the International Space Station (ISS) will board the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft on Thursday and go on a very short journey on it. NASA will broadcast the relocation procedure live, which will last about 45 minutes.
According to the plan, NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeannette Epps, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, will move Crew Dragon to another dock to make room for the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. The latter is to deliver two astronauts, which will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 6 and arrive at the ISS on May 8.
The crew of Crew Dragon will undock from the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:45 a.m. EDT (1145 GMT), and then join another ISS port at 8:28 a.m. EDT (1228 GMT).
The movement maneuver will be supported by flight controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and SpaceX personnel in Hawthorne, California. According to NASA, this will be the fourth port change of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, after previous moves involving the SpaceX Crew-1, Crew-2 and Crew-6 missions.
The flight of the spacecraft during the maneuver will look slow. But in fact, both the spacecraft and the space station are racing around the Earth at a speed of just over 24 thousand km/h.
The launch of the Starliner is highly anticipated among those who follow the development of Boeing spacecraft. Upon arrival at the ISS, it will automatically dock at the docking port of the Harmony module, delivering NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station.
Earlier, we told interesting facts about the Starliner spacecraft.
According to space.com
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