Six Month Mission Off To Nearly Flawless Start

Outside of a hatch that had to be unsealed and resealed to deal with a minor leak, Crew-1 made a beautiful night launch look easy at 1927 ET, Sunday night. An on-target landing of the First Stage got the proceedings off to a good start while the Crew Dragon settled into a nominal orbital profile fairly quickly.

Within a few minutes of launch, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, along with Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency were well on their way to the International Space Station having safely reached orbit, and opened the nosecone in prep for tomorrow's docking.

The Crew Dragon is scheduled to dock to the space station around 2300 (ET) Monday, Nov. 16th. They will join NASA Astronaut Kate Rubins, Kate Rubins, and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, of Roscosmos to make up a seven person crew for the next several months.

Originally scheduled for a Saturday launch, NASA/SpaceX decision teams moved the launch by one day because of onshore winds and to enable recovery of the first stage booster, which is planned to be reused to launch the Crew-2 mission next year.

FMI: www.nasa.gov, www.spacex.com