SpaceX readies Crew Dragon for Halloween launch to space station
CBSN
SpaceX is readying a Falcon 9 rocket for a pre-dawn Halloween launch Sunday to ferry three Americans and a German to the International Space Station. It will be the maiden flight of a new Crew Dragon capsule, "Endurance."
Docking will kick off a hectic few days of handover activity as four departing astronauts, who launched to the lab complex last April, bring their replacements up to speed on station operations before returning to Earth aboard their own Crew Dragon on November 5 to close out a 196-day mission.
"That handover is pretty short on orbit," said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's former chief of spaceflight operations and now a senior manager at SpaceX. "So it's a pretty intense time for us at SpaceX to make sure we're ready to go launch and then we're also ready to go retrieve a vehicle in a fairly short amount of time."
