NASA Prepares for Four Crew Members to Relocate Dragon Spacecraft Port on International Space Station
By NASA information center // May 3, 2023
NASA & SPACE NEWS
(NASA) – Four crew members aboard the International Space Station will relocate their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft’s docking port Saturday, May 6, to make way for the arrival of an upcoming cargo spacecraft.
Live coverage of the move will begin at 7 a.m. EDT.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 crew members NASA astronauts Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev will undock from the space-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:10 a.m. The spacecraft will dock again at the station’s forward Harmony port at 7:53 a.m.
The relocation, supported by ground controllers at Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, will free up Harmony’s space-facing port for the docking of the next Dragon cargo spacecraft set to launch in June.
The zenith port on Harmony allows the Canadarm2 robotic arm easier access to the International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays, or IROSAs, that will arrive at SpaceX’s 28th commercial resupply mission for NASA for installation through a series of spacewalks.
This will be the third port relocation of a Dragon crew spacecraft, following previous relocations during the Crew-1 and Crew-2 missions.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission launched on March 2 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and docked to the space station March 3.
Crew-6, targeted to return in August, is the sixth rotational crew mission from NASA and SpaceX as a part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
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