On Thursday, May 2, in anticipation of NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test, four crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will conduct the relocation of the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft to a different docking port. This maneuver is necessary to accommodate Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
NASA will broadcast live coverage of the relocation starting at 7:30 a.m. EDT on various platforms including NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website. Viewers can learn how to access NASA TV through different platforms, including social media channels.
The crew members involved in the relocation are NASA astronauts Matt Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin. They will undock the spacecraft from the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:45 a.m. Following this, the spacecraft will autonomously dock with the module’s space-facing port at 8:28 a.m.
The relocation operation, coordinated by flight controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, aims to free up Harmony’s forward-facing port for the upcoming docking of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft. Starliner is scheduled to dock autonomously to the forward-facing port of the Harmony module, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station.
This will mark the fourth port relocation of a Dragon spacecraft with crew members, following previous relocations during the Crew-1, Crew-2, and Crew-6 missions.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission, which launched on March 3 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and docked to the space station on March 5, is targeted to return this fall. Crew-8 is the eighth rotational crew mission conducted by NASA and SpaceX as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
