Four astronauts (3 from NASA, 1 from JAXA) will don their flight suits to relocate the Crew Dragon Resilience from the Harmony port of the International Space Station (ISS) to the Harmony zenith port. The spacecraft is scheduled for April 5.
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Last November, the Crew-1 astronauts made a historic journey aboard SpaceX to reach the ISS, after launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With another Crew Dragon arrival and the delivery of new solar panels scheduled for later this year, the ISS should free up the current docking port for the Crew-1 spacecraft at the station's Harmony hub.
The relocation “will mark another first for commercial spaceflight,” NASA said in a statement in late March. NASA TV will broadcast the relocation effort live beginning at 3 a.m. Pacific Time on April 5.
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Crew-1 members Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker of NASA, as well as astronaut Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), will don their flight suits to relocate the Crew Dragon Resilience. The process will take about 45 minutes.
The four astronauts should be on board in case Resilience is unable to dock, NASA said on March 31. This ensures that there are no more crew members on the station than there are available seats.
On April 1, Hopkins shared a tweet with Crew-1, as the astronauts were testing out their SpaceX-designed spacesuits. The tweet read: “We will be taking a short ride with Dragon to move from Harmony front port to Harmony zenith port to make room for our new crew members.”
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NASA plans to launch the Crew-2 mission in April using the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft , which will dock at the forward port when it arrives. The Crew-1 astronauts will return to Earth in late April or early May , leaving the other port open for a solar array payload scheduled for this summer.
