Highlights From SpaceX’s Launch of NASA’s Crew-3 Mission to the Space Station

En route to the station, the astronauts will change out of their flight suits, eat some packaged space snacks and check in with mission control to affirm that things are going as planned. Roughly three hours into their journey, they will go to sleep for about eight hours. When they wake, the spacecraft will autonomously carry out more thruster firings to position itself in the same orbital field as the space station and begin a meticulous — but fully autonomous — process to dock at 7:01 p.m. on Thursday.

NASA and SpaceX are providing continuous coverage of the journey, which can be watched on their YouTube channels, or in the embedded video player below.

Not all space station-bound spacecraft require a full day of travel. Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft has recently been conducting three-hour trips to the space station under a “two-orbit scheme” made possible by a stronger boost to space by its Soyuz-2.1a rocket. The most recent three-hour Soyuz trip took place Oct. 5 when Russia sent a film crew and another astronaut to the space station.

“He was definitely a definitive force, as obviously any parent would be for their child,” Mr. Chari said of his father.

Mr. Chari earned a bachelor’s degree from the U.S. Air Force Academy and a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A colonel in the Air Force, he commanded the 461st Flight Test Squadron and also flew combat missions in Iraq.

Last December, he was selected as a team member for NASA’s Artemis program, making him eligible for future missions to the moon. On Wednesday’s trip to the International Space Station, he will serve as the Crew-3 mission’s commander. It will also be his first journey to space.

The first Indian to travel to space was Rakesh Sharma, in 1984. Trained as a pilot in the Indian Air Force, Mr. Sharma was selected to travel to orbit for a joint Soviet-Indian spaceflight. The mission lasted eight days. He spoke on live television with Indira Gandhi, the prime minister, during the mission.

“How does India look from space?” Mrs. Gandhi asked. Mr. Sharma replied, “I can say without any hesitation, saare jahan se acha,” using the Hindi words for “best in the world.”

Kalpana Chawla, born in the north Indian state of Punjab, was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in 1994 and became the first woman of Indian origin to travel to space in 1997, aboard the space shuttle. She and six other astronauts were killed in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the atmosphere. In 2020, a NASA spacecraft named for Dr. Kalpana completed a cargo shipment to the International Space Station.

Sunita Williams, selected as an astronaut in 1998, was the next Indian woman to travel to orbit. Ms. Williams has spent a total of 322 days in space across two missions and now ranks sixth for the longest amount of time in space among American astronauts and second for any female astronaut. She is currently training for a flight back to the International Space Station on Boeing’s long-delayed Starliner spacecraft.

And more recently, Sirisha Bandla became the second woman born in India to fly to space. A vice president of government affairs at Virgin Galactic, she was aboard Richard Branson’s test flight of the company’s space tourist plane, which traveled to the edge of space in July.

India’s ambitious space program, which has sent robotic probes to the moon and Mars, plans to expand into human spaceflight with a mission called Gaganyaan. Its first launch could occur by the end of 2022 or early 2023. The program so far has selected four astronauts, who completed training in Russia this year but have not yet been named. Three of the trainees are expected to take part in the first crewed launch.

“I actually offered the place to Kayla,” Mr. Maurer said during a news conference, “because I think she and I will be together, like number 600.”

“I was the lucky one that got the round number, but, OK, we will all have fun in space,” he quipped.

The tally began in 1961, when Yuri Gagarin, a Russian astronaut, became the first human to orbit the Earth. Less than a month later, Alan Shepard became the second person, and the first U.S. astronaut, to go to space.

The number of people to travel to space in recent years has increased, and the pace is expected to only accelerate as a market for private spaceflight missions with wealthy tourists takes shape. The tally includes brief suborbital flights, such as the Blue Origin launch in July that carried Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and its former chief executive, to the edge of space with three other passengers.

Between Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and perhaps even balloons that travel to suborbital altitudes, the number of options for wealthy people to travel to space are increasing. China’s Tiangong space station, which is under construction in orbit and is expected to be finished in 2022, may open orbit up to even more astronauts.

Since that test, SpaceX has lifted astronauts to orbit four times. During the first mission in May 2020, two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, flew to the International Space Station. It was the first crewed launch from American soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011. SpaceX has subsequently flown three successful crewed missions: two other missions to the space station carrying a mix of astronauts from NASA, Japan and the European Space Agency, and one fully private tourist mission bankrolled by a billionaire entrepreneur.

For that private mission, four passengers orbited Earth for three days inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft at an altitude roughly 100 miles higher than the space station. It then safely splashed down in the ocean.

For one of the experiments, some astronauts will stick to “an enhanced spaceflight diet” as part of the Food Physiology investigation, which aims to determine the healthiest diet for astronauts living in space for extended periods of time. The results are expected to prove useful for NASA’s future long-duration missions to the moon and, eventually, Mars. A researcher at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston will conduct weekly meetings with participating astronauts throughout their stay on the space station to discuss their diets.

The food investigation’s data “is expected to provide one of the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary human diet, immune, and gut microbiome studies ever completed in microgravity or on Earth,” NASA said on its website.

Another experiment will test technology to calculate the position and altitude of a spacecraft. Hector Guiterrez, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology, is leading the experiment and plans to test software with the space station’s Astrobee system, a network of three robots that serve as assistants to astronauts on the station. The test data gleaned from this experiment could improve how consumer drones on Earth land autonomously or how robots physically interact with one another.

That’s just the start: Over 200 other experiments are planned for the Crew-3 astronauts, from printing fiber optics to studying how concrete hardens in microgravity.

NASA officials discussed the chute issue at length with SpaceX engineers during a routine safety review at Kennedy Space Center ahead of Wednesday’s launch of the Crew-3 astronauts in another Crew Dragon capsule. When those astronauts return in April, they will need to rely on the same type of parachutes.

After examining flight data from Crew-2’s return and the parachute’s manufacturing records from the subcontractor that builds them, teams found no issues with the chute that should prevent Crew-3 from heading to space, said Bill Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX official who once oversaw human spaceflight for NASA, on Tuesday night.

“We’re still learning how to operate these vehicles, we’re learning how to fly in space,” he said, “and the way you do that safely is you keep looking at the data and you learn from each and every flight.”

SpaceX retrieved the Crew-2 capsule’s spent parachutes from the Gulf of Mexico and shipped them back to its facilities in Cape Canaveral, Fla., for inspection. Officials hung the faulty chute off a crane and examined it in daylight “to make sure that there was nothing in that parachute that we didn’t understand,” Mr. Gerstenmaier said. He added that everything looked normal.

Although the other three chutes can carry Crew Dragon’s weight, the capsule’s “laggy” chute seen Monday night highlights how simple parachutes are still essential to safe spacecraft landings on Earth and other worlds, like Mars. For instance, parachute problems have impeded the on-time launch of ExoMars, a joint European-Russian robotic rover for the red planet.

Descent parachutes have also been a headache for NASA over years of testing and a persistent development challenge for both SpaceX and Boeing, the other company under NASA’s Commercial Crew program that is building Starliner, another astronaut capsule that is years behind SpaceX.

“It is behavior we’ve seen multiple times in other tests,” Ms. Lueders said on Monday night about the faulty chute, adding it’s something that “usually happens when the lines kind of bunch up together” until forced open during descent by the wind.

“The thing that makes me feel a little more confident is that the loading and the deceleration of the spacecraft all looked nominal for us, which is good news,” she said.

Mr. Gerstenmaier detailed the toilet incident during a news conference with NASA officials in October and described how SpaceX had scrambled to fix the issue before the launch of the new Crew Dragon capsule on Wednesday. The company replaced the old tube system with a new tube that’s fully welded to its tank and incapable of coming “unglued,” Mr. Gerstenmaier said.

Those fixes were approved by NASA late last month, just before Crew-3’s first launch attempt on Halloween (it was delayed several times after that). The toilet dilemma, however, remained on the Crew Dragon that was docked to the space station until Monday.

The toilet system on that capsule, nicknamed Endeavour, also leaked urine beneath its interior floor, worrying officials on the ground that it could corrode some of the capsule’s aluminum parts and hamper its ability to return astronauts home safely. SpaceX engineers conducted experiments on the ground to test whether the urine, which is mixed with an anti-ammonia compound, could corrode the aluminum.

SpaceX officials said the urine-oxone mixture had little effect on the aluminum parts, citing its experiment and inspections of the Inspiration4 capsule. Heavy coats of paint on Crew Dragon were “a great blocking agent to the liquid,” Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s mission management director for Crew Dragon, told reporters during a news conference.

“We learned that the liquid evaporates within just a couple days,” Ms. Walker said. “And that really limits the impact that we observed when we were doing all of our post-flight inspections.”

The Crew-2 astronauts were instructed not to use Endeavour’s toilet during their 8.5-hour trip home; instead they were to use undergarments — astronaut-grade diapers built into their flight suits.

Fortunately for Crew-3, the facilities are functioning during the voyage of some 22 hours to the space station.

The flights typically take about 24 hours. Shortly after reaching space, Crew Dragon lifts open a top lid, resembling the tip of an eggshell, to expose its docking adapter. The spacecraft approaches the space station in a headfirst position and autonomously docks to one of the station’s entry ports.

SpaceX developed the astronaut taxi with roughly $3 billion from a NASA program called Commercial Crew. The goal of the program was that private companies would own the spacecraft they build, with NASA being just one customer among many buying seats for astronauts. The agency’s previous mode of transportation to the space station was the space shuttle. But the shuttle program was retired in 2011, requiring NASA to buy expensive seats for its astronauts on Russia’s Soyuz rocket for nearly a decade as SpaceX and Boeing, the other company working under Commercial Crew, developed their capsules.

SpaceX’s first mission sending humans to space — a revival of NASA’s ability to loft humans to space from American soil — was in May 2020, with two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, riding Crew Dragon to the space station for a roughly two-month stay. The company has since launched two successful crewed missions for NASA with a combination of American astronauts and crews from Japan and the European Space Agency.

Boeing, the aerospace giant and plane maker, is far behind SpaceX. Development of its Starliner capsule has been marred by a range of technical issues, and it is at least a year away from flying its first crew of astronauts.

Faced with a threat to the zone, the agency worked with Russia’s space agency in Moscow to fire station thrusters that raised its altitude by just under a mile.

“It just makes sense to go ahead and do this burn and put this behind us so we can ensure the safety of the crew,” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s space station manager, told reporters during a news conference on Tuesday.

The debris is a remnant of China’s Fengyun-1C, a weather satellite that launched in 1999 and was decommissioned in 2002 but remained in orbit. In 2007, China targeted the defunct satellite with a ballistic missile on the ground, blowing the satellite to smithereens and creating over 3,000 pieces of debris. The missile test drew condemnation from the United States and other countries at the time.

The wreckage from the satellite was expected to make its close pass of the space station this coming Thursday night, according to Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks objects in space. But now that the station has moved, the threat of a collision is minuscule.

A large portion of that debris cloud is expected to stay in orbit for decades, threatening the space station and other spacecraft.

The station has carried out 29 such avoidance maneuvers since 1999, a year after its construction began. In some instances, astronauts had to board their spacecraft and brace for an emergency departure in case the station was hit and sustained damage.

Only the United States, Russia, China and India have launched antisatellite tests. The most recent occurred in 2019, when India blew up a defunct satellite, an effort to signal its capability for projecting military force in space.

The SpaceX mission that carried four astronauts for NASA, Japan and France to the space station in April had a space debris scare. SpaceX mission control alerted the astronauts that a piece of space debris was projected to whiz by the capsule, although nothing came close, and the crew safely reached the space station on April 24.

Days later, U.S. Space Command determined that the alert was the result of a “reporting error” and “that there was never a collision threat because there was no object at risk of colliding with the capsule.” Still, the incident renewed discussion about the growing threat of space debris and other clutter in low-Earth orbit.

Weather around NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where Falcon 9 will launch from, is expected to be favorable for an on-time liftoff, with only a 30 percent chance of bad weather that could cause a delay, according to Space Force weather officers.

But “it’s not just what happens at the launchpad,” said Will Ulrich, a launch weather officer at the Space Force’s 45th Space Wing in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Officials also monitor weather conditions along the path Falcon 9 takes to get to space, a trajectory called the ascent corridor that runs north along the East Coast. If Crew Dragon needs to trigger its emergency abort system to save the astronauts from a problem with the rocket once it launches, the capsule would need to land under good weather conditions anywhere along that corridor.

“Those conditions, unfortunately, are a little less favorable,” Mr. Ulrich predicted. “That ascent corridor is something my partners are going to be monitoring.”

If weather conditions along the ascent path worsen, the Crew-3 launch would be pushed to Thursday or Friday night.

Matthias Maurer, Crew-3’s mission specialist, is a German astronaut representing the European Space Agency. Mr. Maurer, 51, joined the European astronaut corps in 2015 after roles as a paramedic, a materials scientist and an engineer. In 2016, he spent 16 days with a group of other astronauts and scientists aboard Aquarius, a research and training habitat for future space missions that sits 62 feet below the ocean’s surface near the Florida Keys.

Formally designated as Crew-3’s first mission specialist, Mr. Maurer will officially be the 600th person to ever reach space.

Kayla Barron, 34, also joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2017. She graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a bachelor’s degree in systems engineering in 2010, and a year later received her master’s degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Cambridge. She was among the first group of women to serve on a Navy submarine and was an officer aboard a ballistic missile submarine across three patrols.

Also a mission specialist, she will be the 601st human to reach space.

Ms. Barron and Mr. Chari are also members of NASA’s Artemis astronaut corps — a cadre of 18 astronauts who are eligible to travel to or around the moon as part of the agency’s multibillion-dollar program to build a lunar base and test out technologies for future missions to Mars.

Crew-3’s fourth astronaut is Tom Marshburn, 61, who will set off on his third trek to orbit since joining NASA’s astronaut corps in 2004. Mr. Marshburn has flown on two space vehicles in the past, serving as a crew member aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2009 and on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft in 2013.