SpaceX’s Crew-8 head to launchpad for ride to space

SpaceX’s Crew-8 head to the launchpad on Sunday. NASA
[UPDATE: Crew-8 have launched and are on their way to the space station.] NASA and SpaceX are aiming to launch Crew-8 to the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday night. A live stream of the mission showing the astronauts preparing for the launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida is currently underway on NASA TV. Here’s how to watch the coverage. The mission was supposed to launch last week, but was called off due to poor weather conditions along the flight path. The primary concern for Sunday’s launch is precipitation around Kennedy, but a few hours out, the flight looks more likely than not to take place. SpaceX’s Crew-8 comprises NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick, and Jeanette Epps, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin. This is Barratt’s third space mission, while the other three are heading to orbit for the first time. Epps will be particularly pleased to finally be heading to orbit after being assigned to a Soyuz flight in 2017 from which she was subsequently removed. That was followed by a crewed Starliner mission in 2020 that also never came to be. “It’s been a number of years, but I was confident that I would fly,” Epps said during a recent press conference. “The way that I kept my spirits up was, you know, we continue to train weekly, daily — we train vigorously — for any mission we’re assigned to, so I’ve been busy over the last few years, still training, still working toward the goal of going to the space station.” The four crew members will travel on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and spend about six months living and working aboard the ISS in microgravity conditions around 250 miles above Earth. Crew-8 is the eighth crew rotation flight of SpaceX’s human space transportation system to the ISS through NASA’s Commercial Crew Program — and its ninth mission with astronauts if you include the Demo-2 test flight in 2020. SpaceX had its most successful Starship flight yet last week, achieving a list of objectives including controlled landings for both the first-stage Super Heavy booster and the upper-stage Starship spacecraft in the ocean in different parts of the world. In test flights 5, 7, and 8, SpaceX achieved the impressive feat of bringing the 71-meter-tall booster back to the launchpad at Starbase in southern Texas, using giant mechanical arms on the launch tower to secure the vehicle just above the ground. SpaceX has shared some slow-motion footage of its Starship spacecraft making a controlled landing in the Indian Ocean just over an hour after it launched from SpaceX’s Starbase site near Boca Chica in southern Texas on Tuesday. The Elon Musk-led spaceflight company shared two videos of the landing, with one of them tracking the Starship as it descended to make a controlled, soft landing on the water. SpaceX has shared some dramatic slow-motion footage (below) of the Starship rocket blasting off from the launchpad at the start of Tuesday’s successful flight.  “Liftoff of Super Heavy, the most powerful launch vehicle in history, on Starship’s tenth flight test,” SpaceX said in an online post that included the 30-second video.