NASA’s Artemis 2 mission to the moon puts Crew-12 SpaceX launch in delicate dance

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It’s the best of times, and it’s (far from, in fact) the worst for NASA, with two major astronaut launches converging in the same week, as a rare Arctic cold front pushes mission schedules into a logistical whirlwind.

This is the story of NASA’s most publicized mission in more than half a century: the Artemis 2 astronaut flying around the moon — about the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station (ISS). This takeoff was accelerated in the schedule to replace the Crew-11 astronauts, who were forced to return to Earth early due to undisclosed medical problem with one of the astronauts.

This is a big problem for NASA have – scheduling conflicts ranging from the number of astronaut missions launched to space – and indicative of the progress the agency has made in bringing human spaceflight back to American soil. But the overlap of unusually frigid temperatures affecting Florida’s Space Coast and the rest of the country has turned Crew-12’s launch opportunities into a complex dance around Artemis 2.

On Friday afternoon (January 30), NASA and EspaceX are targeting February 11 as the first opportunity for the launch of Crew-12, with liftoff that day scheduled for 6:00 a.m. EST (11:00 GMT) from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40), at the Cape Canaveral Space Station.

THE wet dress rehearsal for Artemis 2 — a critical pre-launch test to fuel the mission Space Launch System (SLS) – is currently scheduled to take place from Saturday evening (January 31) to Monday (February 2), and the outcome of this two-day test will impact the schedule of both missions.

“The timing between missions depends a bit on what’s happening [with the wet dress rehearsal]” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, during a press conference Friday.

Essentially, Crew-12 is at the mercy of Artemis 2, which is scheduled to launch as early as February 8, with a window closing five hours before Crew-12’s instant launch opportunity at 6:00 a.m. EST (11:00 GMT) on February 11.

Stich outlined several scenarios for Artemis 2 and what each meant for Crew-12’s ability to launch to the space station. “If Artemis were to…have a great wet suit, pass her FRR (flight readiness exam) and take off on the 8th…we would postpone until the 19th,” Stich explained.

Artemis 2 will carry NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christine Koch And Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day mission around the moon and back aboard the Orion spacecraft. This is the first crewed mission to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, and which required much of NASA’s attention and resources.

There’s a lot to “deconflict,” Stich said. For astronaut launches, NASA uses military ships stationed at sea at various points around the planet, where crew capsules can land and be recovered in the event of an emergency or interruption. These assets are shared between Crew-12 and Artemis 2.

Another overlap between the two missions is where astronauts dress for flight. “We tend to use the full equipment room in the O&C (operations and control facilities) where the crew stays,” Stich said. Crew 12, he added, has “the option to go and use the SpaceX combination room…at pad 39A.”

If SLS successfully passes the wet dress rehearsal, attempts to launch on February 8, but is forced to withdraw, that would push Crew-12 back to February 13. In fact, despite possible weather delays, the only way for Crew-12 to attempt a launch during its first window on February 11, Artemis 2 is expected to fail its wet dress rehearsal.

“If they put on a wet dress and they need another wet dress, but they don’t proceed within that window, we could continue as early as the 11th or 12th,” Stich said. “So we have all these different scenarios depending on what happens.”

Crew-12 will be launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket, sending NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev in orbit aboard SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom capsule for an extended stay aboard the ISS.

Freedom will dock at the zenith (space-facing) port of the station’s Harmony module, where it will remain for at least eight months, compared to a typical crew rotation of six months. This will be the second launch into orbit for Meir and Fedyaev, both of whom will visit the ISS for the second time. Hathaway and Adenot are spaceflight newbies who say they are happy to go into space with a crew as close-knit as theirs.

“We learned to build trust with each other, because, of course, we do a risky job where all of our lives depend on the abilities and skills of others, and we really trust each other for that,” Adenot said at a news conference. Crew 12 Press Conference Friday.

Meir, who serves as commander of Crew 12, said the two spaceflight novices are absolutely ready for their upcoming mission, although there are some aspects of spaceflight that you just need to experience to know if you’re ready or not.

“They are very well prepared technically,” Meir said. Except, she added, “the one thing you can’t prepare for, and that’s exactly what it feels like to live 24 hours a day in microgravity.”

“When you arrive on the space station, you’re kind of like a newborn, because you’ve mastered all these other technical things, but it’s the basic newborn skills that you don’t necessarily have,” Meir said. “Those are the ones that are really hard to figure out how to do when you arrive: how to eat, how to drink water, how to go to the bathroom.”

While aboard the orbiting laboratory, Crew-12 astronauts will continue ongoing maintenance of the station and undertake several microgravity research experiments. Much of the science aboard the ISS studies the effects of microgravity on human physiology, and Crew 12 will participate in studies of muscle strength at different levels. gravity phases, brain imaging, meditation and mindfulness, exercise science, and moon landing technology simulations that will inform future Artemis missions.

“The science that we do is really exciting because it not only looks at what can benefit astronauts in real time on the space station, but also the future of exploration missions and, of course, it has many different impacts here on Earth as well,” Meir said.

The Crew-12 astronauts entered a quarantine before the mission on January 28 and currently resides at NASA Headquarters Johnson Space Center in Houston. As their mission approaches, they will be flown to the NASA site. Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but when their mission begins depends entirely on how Artemis 2 and SLS perform during their next test campaign.