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Fully Staffed Station Crew Kicks off Busy Week Waiting for Dragon

SpaceX is targeting Wednesday at 6:24 p.m. EDT for the launch of its 18^th contracted Dragon resupply mission to the International Space Station. This will be the third flight of this particular reusable Dragon space freighter atop a Falcon 9 rocket.

The Expedition 60 crew is now fully staffed with three new flight engineers, who arrived Saturday aboard the Soyuz MS-13 spacecraft, expanding the station inhabitants to six.  Drew Morgan of NASA, Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of Roscosmos are getting used to their new home in space and working to get the orbiting lab up to full speed.

Morgan will be on Dragon duty Friday morning, monitoring its approach to the station. NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch will capture the commercial cargo craft around 7 a.m. with the Canadarm2 robotic arm. Dragon is delivering a variety of research gear supporting human health and the International Docking Adapter-3 (IDA-3) for commercial vehicles from Boeing and SpaceX.

Station managers are planning a spacewalk to complete the installation of the IDA-3 on the space-facing side of the Harmony module. Parmitano, Hague and Koch teamed up Monday to service U.S. spacesuits ahead of the upcoming spacewalk.

Cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Skvortsov focused on science and maintenance in the Russian segment of the space station. Ovchinin photographed the condition of the Zvezda service module docking port and checked radiation readings. Skvortsov, now on his third station mission, inventoried gear delivered aboard the new Soyuz crew ship.

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Mark Garcia

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