SpaceX started off May with its meat-and-potatoes business, sending up a batch of its Starlink satellites during an overnight launch Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, but a planned launch early next week of what would have been the year’s second human spaceflight from the Space Coast has been delayed.
A Falcon 9 rocket carrying 56 internet satellites lifted off from Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 3:31 a.m.
Liftoff! pic.twitter.com/oqX5Gclmwe
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 4, 2023
The first-stage booster making its eighth flight was recovered once again on the droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean.
The company has now flown 21 times from either Canaveral or neighboring Kennedy Space Center, making up all but one of the 22 Space Coast launches so far in 2023. For the year, SpaceX has flown 29 orbital flights including missions from California as well as one test launch of its Starship and Super Heavy from Texas.
Only one launch from the U.S., though, has carried human passengers, when SpaceX sent up the Crew-6 mission from KSC in March in the Crew Dragon Endeavour, and now the second planned human spaceflight, which was slated for as early as Monday night, has been delayed.
On Tuesday, SpaceX, Axiom Space and NASA announced the Axiom 2 mission was no longer targeting early May.
“While the Ax-2 launch is no longer planned for May 8, our team is working closely with NASA and SpaceX to identify upcoming launch opportunities,” read a statement from the Houston-based commercial company, which aims to take its crew of one Axiom employee and three customers up to the International Space Station.
The Ax-2 mission follows a successful 2022 visit when it became the first all-private mission to the ISS bringing a former NASA astronaut and three men who paid $55 million each up for what ended up being more than two weeks on board.
The new mission once again will be commanded by a former NASA astronaut, Peggy Whitson, who is now Axiom Space’s Director of Human Spaceflight. The rest of the crew is aviator John Shoffner, acting as the mission’s pilot, and two mission specialist seats paid for by the Saudi Space Commission, Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali AlQarni.
The Ax-2 flight is still expected to be the second of at least five human spaceflights from the Space Coast this year, with all but one coming from SpaceX. Other SpaceX flights using a Crew Dragon will be the Polaris Dawn mission carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman back to space targeting this summer and NASA’s Crew-7 flight that could come in August. Another Axiom mission could also be on tap for as early as November.
The other planned flight not flying with SpaceX is Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner is also on tap to launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V from Cape Canaveral as early as July 21 carrying two NASA astronauts on what would be the spacecraft’s first flight with humans. Its mission to the ISS aims to clear the path for Starliner to join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for regular rotational missions to the station beginning in 2024.
Boeing and SpaceX were awarded the Commercial Crew Program contract in 2014 as an effort to allow U.S.-based launches of crew so NASA did not have to rely on flights from the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which it had been doing since the end of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011.
SpaceX’s first crewed Dragon flight took place in May 2020, and the company has since flown Dragon with humans on board nine times.
The original contract provided for six missions each to SpaceX and Boeing for operational missions to the ISS, but with Boeing’s delay, SpaceX’s contract has grown to 14 flights. The two will combine to provide the required missions to keep the station occupied until its planned retirement after 2030.
The ISS has had crew on board continuously since November 2000.
