SPACE reports that NASA’s Space Launch System rocket “appears ready to take the next big step – launching astronauts. The debut SLS flight, on Nov. 16, kicked off NASA’s 25-day-long Artemis 1 mission, which sent an uncrewed Orion capsule to lunar orbit and back. … An initial assessment of SLS’ Artemis 1 performance, which NASA released on Nov. 30, gave the rocket high marks, finding that it performed as expected in all areas. Mission team members have now had more time to crunch the numbers, and the reviews continue to be rave, suggesting that no big changes will be required ahead of the first crewed SLS launch.” In a January 27 update, NASA officials wrote, “Building off the assessment conducted shortly after launch, the preliminary post-flight data indicates that all SLS systems performed exceptionally and that the designs are ready to support a crewed flight on Artemis 2.”
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Tag: Crewed Flights
NASA, Roscosmos to Conduct Integrated Crewed Flights to ISS
ExecutiveGov reports that NASA and Roscosmos “have agreed to perform integrated crewed flights to the International Space Station.” The first integrated crewed flight to the ISS “will occur in September and NASA said U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio will join two cosmonauts, Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, who will launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.” Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina, “along with two U.S. astronauts and a Japanese astronaut, will launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule.”
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