SpaceX installs new KSC astronaut walkway

SpaceX’s sleek black and white astronaut walkway swung into place at Kennedy Space Center’s launch pad 39A Monday, signaling another step in the Elon Musk-led space disruptor’s mission to send crews further into the cosmos.

According to Spaceflight Now, the crew access arm was positioned on the launch pad’s fixed service structure late Monday morning. The historic pad, which sent astronauts to the moon and was home to space shuttle launches, has been on a 20-year lease with SpaceX since 2014.

The company is preparing the pad for launches of its Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon spacecraft. Earlier this month, NASA announced the first four astronauts who will ride aboard Crew Dragon to the International Space Station. Two of them, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, will be the first to launch from pad 39A on a crewed mission scheduled for April 2019 — the first of its kind to depart from American soil since the shuttle program was retired in 2011.

SpaceX has already launched more than a dozen missions from launch pad 39A since February 2017, but a majority of its missions have now shifted to pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as work is underway on pad 39A, Spaceflight Now reported.

Whether SpaceX will make good on its goal of sending crew into space in April of next year hinges on two other successful launches: a Crew Dragon test flight without crew scheduled for November and a second test flight in March 2019.

NASA also announced late last week that it will move ahead with SpaceX’s plan to fuel rockets with astronauts in the Crew Dragon capsule, a break from the current procedure of fueling the rockets prior to putting astronauts in place. In 2016, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded during the fueling process.

SpaceX will have to perform five more successful loading procedure demonstrations for NASA before the first crewed flight to move ahead with the “load-and-go” fueling plan.