Crew Dragon mission to wait until late October

NASA has pushed its target launch for the next SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station to late October. Crew-1, the first of six regular contracted missions for the commercial company to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS was originally thought to occur as soon as the end of August.

But NASA on Friday announced the mission won’t launch until at least Oct. 23. It will be first operational flight for SpaceX after the completion of Demo-2. Its crew will be three NASA astronauts, commander Michael Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialist Shannon Walker; and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency mission specialist Soichi Noguchi.

The Demo-2 mission that launched May 30 from Kennedy Space Center with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken was the first crewed mission to the ISS from U.S. soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.

The Crew Dragon departed the ISS and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida’s coast Aug. 2. That capsule, dubbed Endeavour by Hurley and Behnken, will be refurbished and used on the Crew-2 mission in 2021.

SpaceX and Boeing with its CST-100 Starliner are the two companies contracted to take over missions to the ISS so NASA does not have to rely on flights on Russian Soyuz spacecraft that launch from Kazakhstan.

Crew-1 is slated to be a six-month mission. NASA said the delay in launch was to not cause a traffic jam as the Soyuz crew rotation is coming up.

The next Soyuz launch will bring NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Roscomos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey KudSverchkov aboard a Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft to the ISS.