Astronauts in final training for flight on brand new SpaceX crew capsule – Spaceflight Now - Spaceflight Now

30 to the International Space Station visited Cape Canaveral over the weekend for a test run inside SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft, one of the last training events before they return to Florida on launch week.

The four-person crew will launch on the third NASA crew rotation flight to the space station, and the fifth human flight on a Crew Dragon spacecraft overall, including a 2020 test flight and the all-civilian Inspiration4 mission last month.

Chari, pilot Tom Marshburn, mission specialist Kayla Barron, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer puit on the custom-fitted SpaceX fight suits and climbed into the Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft Saturday at SpaceX’s processing facility at Cape Canaveral.

Chari’s crew will replace the Crew-2 astronauts, who arrived at the space station in April after a flight aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft.

Chari and his crewmates selected “Endurance” as the name of the new spaceship, following a tradition set by the astronauts who flew on the first missions of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour and Crew Dragon Resilience capsules.

But the Crew-3 mission will mark the first time SpaceX has reused a Crew Dragon nose cone, which flew previously a different spacecraft.

SpaceX also developed and implemented a quick change to the Dragon toilet on the new capsule after an issue with the waste management system on Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft flown on the private Inspiration4 mission last month.

Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX, said the company developed a “small design improvement” for the toilet on the Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft.

NASA said recent inspections of the toilet on the Crew Dragon Endeavour, which will bring the Crew-2 astronauts back to Earth early November, prompted managers to decide to limit use of the waste system on that spacecraft from undocking until splashdown.

The crew members trained at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, to practice operating the Crew Dragon spacecraft, and at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to prepare for live and work on the space station.

They will participate in a countdown dress rehearsal with the SpaceX support team at launch pad 39A, where they will board their Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket.

Assuming an on-time launch, the Crew-3 astronauts are scheduled to ride the Dragon capsule to an automated docking with the space station at 12:36 a.m.