NASA: Crew-2 mission ‘go’ for Thursday launch

BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. — NASA says all systems are a “go” for Thursday’s Crew-2 launch from Kennedy Space Center.

Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich announced the decision at a briefing Tuesday morning.

“We reviewed all the open work coming out of the agency flight readiness review and the systems on the vehicles and we concluded we are go for launch,” he said.

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Teams are also keeping an eye on the weather, which NASA says looks to be 80% favorable.

This is the second crew rotation flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon and the first with two international partners.

“We got to fly by the pad and see our rocket getting ready to go and it’s just an amazing feeling. I’ve gotten to do that before. And really there’s nothing like it when you look out the window and see spaceship getting prepared and realize going to be riding on it in a few days,” McArthur said.

Dragon is scheduled to dock with the space station about 5:30 a.m. April 23.

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McArthur will pilot the same Endeavour Crew Dragon that carried her husband, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken, and his crewmate NASA astronaut Doug Hurley, on the Demo-2 flight test less than a year ago.

The launch, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is targeted for 6:11 a.m. April 22 from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

You can watch that launch live on WFTV.com when it happens.

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Photos: NASA astronaut, Russian cosmonauts blast off on mission to International Space Station In this image provided by NASA, the Soyuz MS-18 rocket is launched with NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Oleg Novitskiy, Friday, April 9, 2021, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP)

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