The third and fourth missions to deliver people to the International Space Station (ISS) using the Crew Dragon spacecraft will send American, European and Japanese astronauts, as well as another unnamed crew member, to Earth orbit, NASA reports .
The Crew-3 mission with astronauts Raju Chari, Tom Marshburn, Kyle Barron and Matthias Maurera is scheduled for October 31. Crew-4 with Chell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Samantha Cristoforetti will take place no earlier than April 15. The fourth crew member of this mission has yet to be approved.
In April, the acting head of NASA, Steve Yurchik, in an interview with Spaceflight Now, did not rule out that the first flight of a Russian cosmonaut on the American spacecraft Crew Dragon and Starline will take place no earlier than 2022. According to Yurchik, we are talking about the SpaceX Crew-4 mission, the launch of which will take place no earlier than the first quarter of 2022. The acting head of NASA noted that the draft version of the corresponding "implementation agreement" between NASA and Roscosmos is still under consideration by the US State Department.
At the same time, the general director of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, said that the state corporation was not negotiating the delivery of astronauts to the ISS using Crew Dragon.
The fact that Russian cosmonaut Sergei Korsakov can go to the ISS on Crew Dragon, Interfax reported in March with reference to the head of the Cosmonaut Training Center Pavel Vlasov.
Ivan Potapov
