Image: SpaceX
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Crew-4 team recently took a trip to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to train for their upcoming mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
The Crew-4 team comprises NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, Jessica Watkins, and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.
At SpaceX headquarters, the astronauts participated in simulations aboard a high-fidelity simulator of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to prepare for undocking and departure from the ISS, the agency said on Thursday.
The simulator included flight-realistic hardware, displays, and seats. Each astronaut practiced suiting up and configuring the spacecraft for departure, along with monitoring the spacecraft’s status and taking manual control if need be.
The crew also went down to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to train on the emergency egress system for launch tower evacuation at Launch Complex 39A, and they prepared for recovery operations, after splashdown at the end of their mission, aboard SpaceX’s Dragon recovery vessels off of the coast of Florida.
The Crew-4 astronauts are slated for a science expedition aboard the ISS, where they will live and work as part of the orbiting laboratory’s Expeditions 67 and 68.
The Crew-4 mission is set to launch Friday, April 15, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. That’s around the time NASA’s SpaceX Crew-3 astronauts are expected to make their return trip to Earth.
Crew-4 will mark NASA’s fourth crew rotation mission with SpaceX. The space agency on Monday announced it had contracted SpaceX for three additional ISS crew missions under its Commercial Crew Transportation Capabilities (CCtCap) program.
