Private aerospace firm SpaceX is all set for its newest crewed mission to space. The Crew-3 mission will be launched will see four astronauts flying to space. It will be SpaceX’s fifth crewed flight to space and forth to the ISS. The mission will fly the four to the rotating laboratory aboard the Dragon capsule. The flight will begin its journey to the ISS on October 30. The date coincides with the Halloween weekend. The mission was slated for a launch on October 23. But it was pushed to October 30. The Dragon capsule will be placed atop the Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket will be launched by the US space agency NASA’s Florida-based Kennedy Space Center. The four astronauts are Tom Marshburn, Raja Chari, Kayla Barron, and Matthias Maurer.
The four astronauts will stay at the ISS for six months. Raja will be leading the crew to the International Space Station. He became a NASA astronaut in 2017. A colonel in the Air Force, this will be Raja’s spaceflight. He will also serve as Expedition 66 flight engineer aboard the ISS. He has experience of over 2,500 hours of flight time as a test pilot. The mission follows Inspiration4. It was an all-civilian crewed mission by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It was the first civilian spaceflight. It Dragon capsule was launched atop Falcon 9 rocket on September 15. The capsule circled the Earth every 90 minutes for three days. The
SpaceX said that the Crew-3 astronauts will do more science experiments in space. They will push the effort to test exploration risks in space. They will also demonstrate technology for deep space exploration. NASA specified that experiments will include human research and rodent research on the space station. The agency said that astronauts will spend time working hard. They will also have some room for fun as they will be spending days in Earth’s orbit during the winter holidays. Before the Inspiration4 mission, SpaceX had launched Crew-1 and Crew-2 missions to the ISS following Demo-2.
