NASA, SpaceX are 'go' to launch Crew-2 astronauts to space station on Earth Day - Space.com

SpaceX and NASA are officially "go" to proceed with launching four astronauts to the International Space Station next week, with the completion of a critical flight readiness review on Thursday (April 15). .

The Crew-2 mission is scheduled to lift off next Thursday (April 22), which also happens to be Earth Day.

It will be the second flight of this particular Crew Dragon; the same capsule, named "Endeavour," carried NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to and from the space station last year for the Demo-2 test flight.

Inside the Crew Dragon will be four Expedition 65 crewmembers, who will spend about six months in space: NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet. .

Related: SpaceX's Crew-2 astronaut mission for NASA: Live updates.

"The flight readiness review was very successful; we only had one exception," Kathy Lueders, NASA's head of human spaceflight, said in a news conference Thursday.

Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX (and former NASA human spaceflight chief), said in the same news conference that the teams "discovered there was a potential loading error, where we may actually be loading a little extra oxygen in our [Falcon 9] tanks." SpaceX's Falcon 9 rockets use liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene for propellant.

EDT (1011 GMT) on April 22 and dock with the International Space Station just over 23 hours later, at 5:30 a.m.