Transcripts For CSPAN NASA Prelaunch News Conference 2024071

To the traditional prelaunch News Conference ahead of the falcon and crew 1 dragon launch to the iss. Here to provide all the details are folks that were part of the review today and also have been part of the preparations that led up to this moment as an exciting day for everybody in nasa and spacex. An everyone tuning in today. Let me introduce the panel, and i will let each one of them give you some words before we take questions. Steve stich. He is the nasa manager for the commercial crew program here at kennedy. Also joel montalbano, the nasa manager of the International Space Station Program at Johnson Space center in houston. Norm knight, the deputy manager of Flight Operations director at johnson. Also joining us is benji reed, the senior director of human spaceflight programs at spacex. We are glad to have him with us. Also, kirt costello, the nasa iss program chief scientist at Johnson Space center. And arlena moses, the launch weather officer for the u. S. Air force 45th weather squadron. I know everyone is looking forward to hearing from arlena as well. With that, i will turn it over to steve and let him take it from there. Steve thank you. It is great to be here, following the launch readiness review today. It has been a busy few days. Since we talked on tuesday, we have put the falcon 9 vehicle through a static fire, an important test for us to check out the rocket, to make sure all the 9 engines on f9 and all the systems on the rocket were functioning as expected. We reviewed all of that data over the last few days, and the rocket looks really good. It was important for us to also do inspections after that, the static fire. We swapped out a couple of engines on the vehicle and did those inspections, and everything looks really good. We also did a dry dress practice with the crew. The crew suited up, got in their spacesuits, went out to the launchpad, and got installed in the vehicle. It is the first time we have put four people in dragon. So that was an important test for us. And that test went really, really well. Overall, in terms of looking at the weather and also looking at recovery of the booster for this flight, we have adjusted the launch date. We were targeting a saturday launch. We adjusted it 24 hours later. Today we are targeting a sunday lunch at 7 27 eastern time. That will put docking at monday at 11 00 p. M. Eastern time. We looked carefully at the weather. The onshore flow looked not so good saturday. Also, we needed to get the drone recovery ship in place to recover the booster for nasa and spacex. This booster is very important for us. We will use the first stage we are flying on crew one for the crew two system that has a launch date of march 30. It is important to recover that booster so we needed to get the drone ship in place. Overall, it will be an exciting flight. Crew1 will be the longest u. S. Spaceflight ever, exceeding what we had on the final skylab mission. Skylab three. It is a First Mission to have four crew in the capsule, which we are excited about, to enhance the science on the space station. And it is our first licensed launch by the faa as well. As we move into this next step. So we are excited to fly this mission for the space Station Program. We will continue to watch the weather and the vehicles. We are looking forward to a good launch on sunday. Joel thank you, steve. Welcome again to todays press brief. These last few days, we have had a number of reviews and operations, and today, as we concluded the launch readiness, i can tell you the International Space Station Partnership is ready for this mission. Looking at a launch time of 7 27 p. M. Eastern time on sunday, giving us a docking late monday evening, approximately 11 00 p. M. Eastern time. Shortly after docking, we will do the standard leak checks and then we will have a welcome ceremony on board. That will be about two and half hours after docking. This week, we have been doing a lot of discussion with kate and sergei on orbit today, keeping them up to speed with the preparations. They are excited and ready to have new crewmembers on board. This vehicle is also bringing approximately 240 kilograms of pressurized cargo to enhance what we are doing on board the International Space station. With these four crewmembers, adding to the three crew members on board, we will have a total of seven iss crew members. For a sustained increment. This vehicle will stay for a Long Duration increment and return in april of next year. We look forward to having the extra capability on board which will allows to increase the science we do and increase the expiration development we do for the Artemis Program and future programs. We also, this year, our celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on board the International Space station. During those 20 years, we set the standard for international cooperation. And international operations. But we keep learning. We learn every day. And nasa, with american industry, has developed these commercial vehicles that will allow us to bring more people to low earth orbit, to the International Space station, and allow us to bring more science, and allow more commercial opportunities. With that, a huge thanks to the commercial crew program, to spacex for getting us where we are today. The International Space Station Partnership is glad to be here. We are excited for launch on sunday. We are looking forward to mondays docking and to the Long Duration increment. Norm thank you, joel. The launch readiness review went very well today. Stepping back and reflecting on demo 2 and the Development Cycle now to the operational cycle, just with the journey leading up to this ,and the lrr, it was evident there was great improvement on the overall Readiness Level from the team on this vehicle. So it was very encouraging. An absolute focus on crew safety and vehicle safety, which both the nasa and spacex teams have done a great job with. We are satisfied with that. This was on the heels of dry dress yesterday that steve mentioned. That went really well. That was the first opportunity to let the crew suit up and really try out their vehicle for the first time, before launch day, to make sure the fit was right and there were no lastminute type things that needed to be tweaked. That went very well. We are very excited about that. We had an opportunity to meet with the crew this morning and talk with them about their upcoming launch. They were absolutely excited. You can just feel the radiant excitement coming off of them. When i walked out of the briefing, i was excited myself. You could just feel the energy from the crew. We see that throughout the team, which is great, because it means we are real close and ready to go, which is very important. The message that they wanted to convey is resilience, and to echo once again the journey to get here is one of resilience. And it was a hard journey with a lot of stuff going on, covid affecting the teams, but it was that resilience and determination by a lot of folks that led up to this point. We will safely get them into orbit and we will safely get them docked, performing six months of science, and returning back to earth safely as well. Again, a lot of folks involved with that. And just an appreciation for that hard work that has got us to this point. With that, i will turn it over to benji and look forward to questions later. Benji thank you very much, norm. First of all, sitting here, i am excited, again, to be here. To think this is our third time we had the opportunity to come and launch here from Kennedy Space center. We did our inflight test at the beginning of this year. We did our demo 2 mission, and now we are coming up here with crew1, our first Operational Mission to provide crewed services to the station. To keep joels Program Running at sixmonth intervals. Briefingtch the press you saw the montage of all the , different, past crewed missions. To talk about 20 years in space. It is so cool and an honor to get to be here. I am stoked. On behalf of all the spacex employees, our vendors, our 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 this sacred honor and responsibility on our shoulders. This is the culmination of years of work and effort, from a lot of people, and a lot of time. And we have built what i would call the safest launch and spacecraft launch vehicles ever. We culminated our efforts in that with our static fire wednesday. I think we have a video to show for that. [video clip] [sound of explosion] that was a full seven second duration static fire. The teams look at all the data coming out of the static fire. They finished that up, we did joint reviews with the nasa teams and our teams, and it looked great. We assessed everything that came from the vehicle and feel very good about it. We did some work on the engines and other aspects of the vehicle as we were getting ready for the launch. And that static fire is key. And those seven seconds look awesome. The next thing i want to show is a picture from dry dress, the dress rehearsal with the crew. They do the whole thing, where they get suited up at the building. What they call the onc building here at Kennedy Space center. They come across in their teslas and go up the tower and get all the way into dragon. It is a very important process we do, where we walk through all of that with our teams, the ground teams, the crew themselves, make sure everything checks out. When i look at this picture, again, i get very excited to think about this next step on this big journey we have ahead of us. We have four astronauts who will be going up. We have one person who has never been to space, victor, who is very excited. We have soichi, our First International partner, who will be joining us, which will be really, really cool. Lets talk about what will happen on launch day itself, as i talked about, dry dress as a practice for that. Four hours before launch day, the crew will be getting suited up. Our suit techs will be helping them get ready. We will do various leak and fit checks. The astronauts will come out about three hours before launch, they will get into the teslas, wave goodbye to their families and all their friends who are there, and come across to the launch pad. They will go up the tower, cross the arm, and about two and half hours before launch, they will enter the vehicle. They will get inside the vehicle. They will get all strapped in and safe. At approximately about 45 minutes before launch is when we will do the final go poll for loading the vehicle and for arming the escape system. We have a launch escape system on dragon that is ready to go, just in case. If something goes wrong with the launch vehicle, dragon can get the crew to safety in the ocean. So that will be armed. At that point, about 30 minutes before launch, is when we start loading the launch vehicle with propellants. And we are off. Lets go next to our line drawing. This gives you a sense of what it looks like and we are actually doing launch. I will not go through all the details, but some of the highlights here. About two minutes and 40 seconds, we have our first and second stage separation. After that happens, the first stage will land on the drone ship, which is heading out right now to be in position to be ready for that. And in the second stage, we will continue to carry dragon into orbit. About eight minutes and 50 seconds, the engine will cut out. Then dragon will separate, and they are off on their journey to the station. In the next line drawing, we get a sense of what it looks like. Phrasing is this process where we are catching up with the space station. You know, the space station is zooming around the earth very fast. So is dragon. You are kind of using this game where you are using gravity and the behavior of orbital mechanics as well as minimizing the fuel to get the vehicles to catch up. And to get the two vehicles to come together. So we call this process phasing. Based on the orbital mechanics, the time on the day of launch, this particular phasing time will take about 25 hours. In we will be close to where we 25 hours need to be to be in position to come up to the station. And a few hours after that, we will have docked to the space station. I will talk about what happens once they dock. The crew docks on station. And they will come through and be welcomed by the other crew up there and start to get to work very quickly. Two things that involve spacex that will be happening during their six months on station. One is coming up in a few weeks, we have our first cargo dragon 2 vehicle. That will be our crs 21 Mission Heading up. And that is full of science for the crew1 crew to be working on. For the first few weeks after they have docked they will be , getting ready for that, they will be wrapping up other work, and preparing. They will be spending a lot of time working on the Critical Science going on there. And then near the end of their time, at the end of the the six months or so, we will be sending up another dragon, so the crew2 dragon will go up, with another four astronauts on board, and that dragon will go up, docked to the station. Be a handoff and the crew will see each other and , about a week later, our crew1 crew will come home. So lets take a look at what that will look like in a line drawing. You see here we do another departure, both the docking and undocking is fully automated. At any time during that docking, the astronauts are able to take control. Both astronauts on the vehicle and iss drink docking and undocking are watching closely everything that is happening. We want to make sure everything is happening correctly. As we move away from station, we get into position to actually start our phasing to come home the same process. , we need to phase to make sure we hit the right spot on the earth at the right time for a splashdown. After that happens, our recovery crews will come out, and they will be meeting the crew. We have a large recovery vessel, plus a couple of fast boats, who fast boats. The fast boats will go out and meet the crew. The first thing they will do is check the area, make sure everything is safe for approach. The second will check for parachutes. Then we will go ahead with our larger vehicle, which will pull dragon out of the water. One of the things i want to mention, as we talk about this recovery process. We know everybody is very excited about launch and very excited about recovery and human spaceflight in general. We ask everyone involved, if you come out to watch the launch or any of the different operations we are doing, to please wear the mask and do all those social please wear your mask and follow all of the social distancing guidelines. And during recovery, we ask all of the boaters pay good attention to what the navy and coast guard regulations are and what their advisories will be. It is very important we keep all of our recovery crews and the astronauts themselves safe. I want to take one more moment to do a couple of important things. One, i want to thank all of the spacexers and their families and all our different teams and partners who have been involved in this effort to get as here. To get us here. It is a very big team. Part of certification, as we have gone through and talked about the other day, that nasa certify all of our systems for human space flight, that certification means a lot. It represents the countless hours and hours of work put in by all of these teams. It is dragon, falcon, the ground teams, the launch site teams, the factory it is all of our , hardware and software operators, everybody. All of them put their time in, sacrificed, and done dedication the needed. The same is true for all of our vendors and partners. So, a big thank you. Finally, a very important special thank you to the astronauts who will be flying, victor, mike, shannon, and soichi. We thank you for the trust we have put into space x to get you there and bring you home safely. Thank you on behalf of all of us. Kyle now we will hear about the science and the reason these guys are actually going up there. Kirt thank you. As joel mentioned, it was less than two weeks ago that we were celebrating 20 years of continuous crewed presence on orbit. We were not celebrating an ending but really just the end of the beginning. The launch coming up, with additional crew members to the iss, is the start of a new era for research and discovery on board. The capabilities of the crewed dragon, bringing additional crew and samples back to the site here at ksc are an amazing capability. We hope to double the amount of crew time going into science and research. We will have easier access for those examples when they come back to earth. And we will have easier access to our crew members, both preand post flight, to conduct some of our Human Research. We do have several investigations going up on this flight. We have about 28 kilograms of payloads going up. Some of those experiments will be going up for soichi, to include education and Public Outreach experiments for him. Then we have a student experiment called genes in space7, which will be looking at the humble fruit fly and how it adapts on orbit to changes in circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythm is our sensitivity to the day and night cycle here on earth. And if you can imagine, on orbit, when you have 16 daynight cycles every day, it can be a bit confusing to the body. Fruit flies are great model organisms. They help us understand what is going on in the human body, because they share about 75 of the genes that cause disease in the human body. So we will be looking at those. Last, but not least, our astronauts are members of our Human Research team. They will be conducting a number of experiments on themselves, both before, during, and after the mission. One of those is food physiology, looking at whether nutritional changes in the astronauts diet can be beneficial for preventing space flight impairments we typically see in orbit. Again, for mike, victor, soichi, and especially my old alum from ric