Reporters on the upcoming spacex mission, with a four person crew head into the International Space station. The launch is now scheduled for saturday evening. Kennedy space center in florida. I would like to welcome everyone to the traditional pre launch News Conference following todays launch readiness review ahead of the crew one falcon 9 and dragon flight to the International Space station. Here to provide all of the details are folks that were part of the review today. And also have been part of a lot of the preparations that have led up to this moment. Its an exciting day for everyone for nasa and spacex and hopefully everyone tuning in today. Let me introduce the panel and ill let them give you words before they take questions. Steve, the program here at kennedy, and joel montbano, of Johnson Space center in houston, and norm knight, the deputy manager of Flight Operations director at johnson. Also joining us is bengy reed, the senior director of human Space Programs and spacex, great to have him with us, and kurt costello, the nasa chief scientist at Johnson Space center. And last but not least, arlenea moses, the launch weather officer for the 45th weather squadron, so i know everybody is looking forward 20 hearing from her. With that, turn it over to steve. Thank you, kyle. And its great to be here following the launch readiness review today. It has been a busy few days since we last talked. We talked to you after the flight mainstream review on tuesday, and since that time, we have put the falcon 9 vehicle through a fire, to make sure that all of the systems on the rocket were functioning as expected and we have reviewed all of that data and the rocket looks really good. It was important for us to do some inspections after that. And we swapped out a couple of inspections and everything looks really good. We did a dry dress practice with the crew and they suited up and got in their space suits and on the launch pad and into the vehicle. This is the first time we have put four people in dragons vests, and that wet really well. Oval, in terms of looking at the weather and looking at recovery of the booster for this flight, we have adjusted the launch day. We were doing a saturday launch, and adjusted it 24 hours later and today were starting a sunday launch at 7 27 eastern time and that will put docking on monday at 11 p. M. Eastern time. We did that, and looked carefully at the weather and the onshore flow looked really not so good for saturday. And also, we needed to get the drone recovery ship in place to recover the booster for nasa, and the booster for spacex is very important for us. Were going to reuse the first phase were flying on 1 for the crew mission, and crew 2 has a launch date of march 30th. So its important to recover that booster to get the drone ship in place. Oval, its going to be an exciting flight. Crew one is going to be the longest space flight ever, exceeding what we had on sky lab 3. Its important to have the crew in the capsule, which were excited about for the space station, and its our first faa light launch as well as we move into the next step. So were excited to fly this increment mission for the program and to launch. And were looking forward to a launch on sunday. Ill turn it over to joel. Thank you, steve. And welcome to the press brief. In the past days, we have had a number of reviews as steve mentioned and today as we concluded the readiness review, i can tel tell you that were ry for this mission. A launch time of 7 27 p. M. Eastern time on sunday, giving us a docking of late monday england, approximately 11 p. M. Eastern time. Shortly after docking, well do the standard lead checks and then have a welcome ceremony onboard, and that will be 2 and a half hours after docking. This week, we have been doing a lot of discussion with kate and sergei on orbit today and keeping them up to speed on the preparations and theyre excited and ready to have new crew members onboard. This vehicle is bringing in approximately 240 kilograms of pressurized cargo to enhance what were doing on the International Space station. With these four crew members, adding to the three onboard, well have a total of seven crew members for a sustained increment. This vehicle will stay up for a Long Duration increment and returning april of next year. So were looking for the sustained time onboard to allow the science and the increased development we do and for the art miss program and future programs. Also this year, celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence onboard the International Space station. And during those 20 years, we set the standard for International Cooperation and international operations, but we keep learning. We learn every day. And you know, nasa, with american industry has developed these special vehicles that allow us to bring more people to lower earth orbit. To the International Space station, and allows more science on earth orbit and more commercial opportunities. So huge thanks for the commercial program and to spacex to getting us to where we are today. Were glad to be here and excited for the launch on sunday and looking forward to mondays docking and the Long Duration ink met. So with that, ill turn it over to norm. Thank you, joe, and as stated, the review today went very well. Weeingo that. And stepping back to the cycle with just the journey leading up to this, and it was evident that the closed out work and the less work there was in the overall Readiness Level in the team for this vehicle. So it was very encouraging, an absolute focus on crew safety and vehicle safety. Which both the nasa and the spacex teams have done a very good job with. And were very satisfied with that. This was on the heels of dry dress yesterday, as steve mentioned and that went very well and it was the first opportunity to let the crew set up and try out the vehicle to make sure that the fit was right and there were no last minute type things that needed to be tweaked up prior to launch and that went very well and were excited about that. I had an opportunity to meet with the crew this morning to talk with them a little bit about their upcoming launch and they were absolutely excited. And you could just feel the radiant excitement coming off of them. And in fact, when i walked out of that briefing, i was excited myself. You could just feel the energy from the crew, and we have seen that throughout the team, which is great, which means that were real close and ready to go, which is very important. You know, the message that they wanted to convey is resilience, and to echo once again that the journey to get here is one of resilience. And it was a hard journey with a lot of stuff going on, and covid affecting the teams, but it was that resilience and determination by a lot of folks that have led up to this point, and well safely get them into orbit and safely get them docked before six months ago of science and returning back to earth safely as well. So again, a lot of folks that were involved with that, and just an appreciation for that hard work that has got us to that point. So with that, i will turn it over to benji and look forward to questions later. Great, and thank you very much, norm. First of all, i am sitting here and im excited again to be here. To think that this is our third time we have had the opportunity to come here and launch from Kennedy Space center, and we did our inflight test back in the beginning of the year and did our demo 2 missions and now were coming up on the first Operational Mission to start providing crude services to the station, to keep joels program running, six month intervals, its incredible and if you wauped this before the press briefing, you saw the montage of the past missions and to hear joel talk about the last 20 years in space, its so cool and an honor to be here. Im certainly stoked. On behalf of all of the spacex employees and our vendors and partners, all of our families, i want to take this opportunity to say thank you to nasa and to all of our partners to let us be part of this, and to help carry the sacred honor and responsibility on our shoulders. This is the culmination of years of work and effort from a lot of people. A lot of time, and we have built, i think what i would call one of the safest launch and spacecraft ever. And its an honor to be part of that. We culminated our efforts with that with our static fire on wednesday, and steve mentioned that and i think that we have a video to show that. That was a full 7 seconds static fire, and they finished that up. Those reviews, we did joint reviews with the nasa teams and our teams and it looked great. We assessed everything that came from the vehicle and we felt very good about it. As you know, we did work on the engines and the vehicles, and getting ready for that launch, and that static fire is very key to ensuring that were ready to go. Those 7 seconds looked awesome and the next thing i want to show you, a picture that we have from dry dress, and thats the dress rehearsal that we do from the crew. And they do the whole thing, where they get suited up in the onc building here in Kennedy Space center, and they come across in their tess laz, and go up the tower and go all the way to the dragon and its an important process that we do, we walk through that and the ground team is working with the crew and the crew itself and making sure that everything checks out. When i look at this picture, i get excited about the next it step on the big journey we have ahead of us. We have four astronauts going up, and we have one person who has never been to space, victor, who is very excited. We have savicci, our First International partner and its really really cool. Lets talk about whats going to happen on launch day itself. And as i talked about dry dress as a practice for that. And four hours before launch day, the crew will be in the onc building, in the area getting suited up and our suit techs will be helping them get ready and well be doing various leak checks and fit checks as we go through that, and the astronauts will come out 3 hours before launch and get into the teslas, and wave goodbye to their families and come across to the launch pad. Come across the launch tower and come across the crew arm and 2 and a half hours before launch, they will get in the vehicle. They will get inside of the vehicle and get all strapped in and safe at about approximately 45 minutes before launch and they will do the final go poll for loading the vehicle and for arming the escape system. We have a launch escape system on dragon thats ready to go just in case something goes wrong with the launch vehicle, dragon can escape the crew to safety and splash down in the ocean. At that point, 30 minutes before launch is when we start loading the launch vehicle with propellant. And were off. Lets go next to the line drawing that we have. And this gives you a sense of what it looks like doing the launch. I wont go through all of the details, and coming through the highlights here, 2 minutes 40 seconds, we have the first and second stage separation, and after that happens, the first stage will land on the ship, which is heading out right now to be in position to be ready for that. And in the second stage, were going to be carrying dragon to orbit. 8 minutes 50 seconds intoed mission, the second engine will cut out and shortly that, dragon will separate and theyre off to the journey to station. If we go to the next line drawing, we can see that. And get a sense of what this looks like. So phasing is the process where were essentially catching up with space station. And the process is, space station is zooming around the earth very fast and so is dragon. Youre trying to use the game where you are using the dragon and minimizing the amount of fuel to catch up and get the two vehicles to come together. So you go through this process of phasing, and based on the mechanics and the day and time of launch, in this case, the particular phasing time will take about 25 hours, and 25 hours well be close to where we need to be to basically be in position to come up to the station, and then a few hours that, we will have docked to the station. Im going to talk about whats going to happen once they dog. The crew dock on the station, and they will be welcomed by the other crew up there, and get to work quickly. The two things involving spacex during their six months on station, one is coming up in a few weeks. We have our first cargo dragon, our new dragon 2 cargo vehicle, that will be our cirrus 21 mission, and thats full of science for the crew to be working on. And so the first few weeks after they docked, theyre going to be getting ready for that and wrapping up other work and they will be spending time working on all of the Critical Science going on there, and near the end of their time, well be sending up another dragon, so crew 2 dragon will go up, again with another four astronauts on poured and that will dock to station, and again, there will be a handoff and they will see each other, hand off the work and about a week later our crew one will come home. Lets look at that. You can see here, we do another departure. The docking process, its fully automated and autonomous. And the astronauts were able to take control. And the astronauts on the iss are able to see that everything is happening correctly. And as we head away, we start the phasing to come home and its the same process that i talked about. We need to phase to make sure that we hit the right spot on the earth at the right time for splashdown. After that happens, our recovery crews will come out and they will be meeting the crew. We have a large recovery vessel and fast boats, and the fast boats will go out and meet the crew and the first thing they will do is check the area and make sure that everything is safe for approach. And the second fast boat will be recovering the parachutes, and then well go ahead with the larger vehicle, which will pull dragon out of the water. All right, one of the things i do want to mention as we talk about this recovery process, we know that everybody is very excited about launch and very excited about recovery and human space flight in general. And we ask that everybody is resolved and if you come out to watch the launch and everything that were doing, wear your mask and follow social distancing guidelines and keep everybody safe. And second, we ask that all of the boaters Pay Attention to what the navy and the coast guard regulations are and add advisories. Its very important that we keep the recovery crews and the astronauts themselves safe. I want to take one more moment to do a couple of important things. Number one, i want to thank all of the spacexers and their families. And then all of our different teams and partners involved in the effort to get us here. Its a very big team. And part of the certification as we have gone will you and talked about the other day, that nasa has certified all of our systems for human space flight. That certificationest is really important and it represents the countless hours and hours of work that were put in by all of these teams. Dragon and falcon, the ground team, the launch site teams, and its all of our hardware and software operators and everybody, all of them put our time in and sacrifice and dedication needed. The same is true for all of our nasa partners and vendors, a big thank you there. And finally, a very important special thank you to the astronauts who will be flying. Victor, mike, shannon, and to your family, we thank you for the trust that you put into spacex to get you to space, to be there as a lifeboat and get them home safely. Thank you on behalf of all of us. Well hear from kurt, talking about the science and the reason that these guys are actually going up there, take it away, kurt. Thank you, as joel mentioned earlier, it was less than two weeks ago we were celebrating 20 years of continuous crude presence on orbit. And we were not celebrating an ending, but just the end of the beginning. The launch coming up with additional crew members to the iss is the start of an era for research and discovery onboard. The capabilities much the crew dragon bringing additional crew and samples back to the site at ksc is an amazing capability. We hope to double the crew time for science and research, and we hope to get easier access for those satchels when they come back to earth and easier access for our crew members, pre and postflight to conduct some of our human research. We have self investigations going up on this flight. We have 28 kilograms of payloads going up, and some of those experiments will be going up to include education and Public Outreach experiments for him. And then we have a human experiment looking at the humble fruit fly, and how it adapts in orbit for rhythm. And if you can imagine when you have 16 day and night cycles every day, it can be confusing to the body. They are great little organisms, they share 95 of the genes that cause disease in the human body. And last but not least, our astronauts are on the research team, and they will be before and after the mission, one is food physiology, which is looking at whether nutritional changes in the astronauts diet can be for the astronauts diet. And again, mike and victor and especially for my old alum, shannon from rice, godspeed and thank you so much for the hard amount of work and research youre going to be putting in. Thanks, kurt. And something that everybody likes to talk about is weather. So lets turn it over to arlenea and have her give the latest launch forecast. For us in florida, we have been plagued by Tropical Storm eta for most of the upcoming weekend and it was uncertain at first if it was going to clear out this weekend. But thankfully eta is well out to sea and moving further with time and with its passage, it brought a bit of a cool front here into florida. It doesnt feel like it much now, its still warm and humid. But overall, its going to give us a pretty good shot for weather for the primary launch date. As we look at the forecast, we are looking right now with a possibility of 40 with that kind of weak front that came through. A couple of days ago, its going to kind of creep back towards us, and were going to keep the winds light and variable. So its not going to be as much of a concern for our attempt to launch on sunday. But were going to see a few showers in here with cumulus clouds, and election the concern for flying both the dragon and the capsule, during the launch time. As we look at our backup window going into wednesday, so a coupl