This Week in Launch: Crew-8 launch week for second crewed flight of the year

While it’s a rather slow week for rocket launches, SpaceX makes up for it with one big exciting mission. For the first launch of March, by just a few minutes, SpaceX will be launching Crew-8 for NASA to the ISS for a six month stay in space.

This week’s launches:

• February 29 (Thursday)
  • Roscosmos | Soyuz 2.1b | Meteor-M n°2-4 | 12:43 A.M. ET
    • Site 1S, Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia
  • CASC | Long March 3B/E | Unknown Payload | 8:00 A.M. ET
    • LC-2, Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China
• March 1 (Friday)
  • SpaceX | Falcon 9 | Crew-8 | 12:04 A.M. ET
    • LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florda

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SpaceX gears up for second crewed flight of 2024

The crew of Crew-8 arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Saturday from Johnson Space Center over in Houston. This begins the long week of launch preparations both from the crew, NASA, and the launch provider, SpaceX.

Monday night SpaceX rolled out a brand new Falcon 9 booster out to LC-39A with the veteran Crew Dragon Endeavour on top. Like previous big NASA missions, SpaceX conducted a dress rehearsal and short static fire of the rocket. The crew that will be flying on this mission, Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Alexander Grebenkin will conduct several dress rehearsals on various systems before launching, including entering and getting strapped into the Dragon for launch.

This will be SpaceX’s second crewed spaceflight mission of 2024. The first was Ax-3, the third mission from Axiom Space to the ISS. Later this year Axiom hopes to launch another mission to the ISS through NASA’s commercial astronaut mission program.

Throw in another NASA crew rotation and potential mission from the Polaris program and that brings you to five total crewed missions in 2024.

Starship gets past first FAA hurdle

The FAA announced in a statement that it has received and closed out IFT-2 mishap investigations. The SpaceX led investigations, one for the booster and one for the Starship upper stage, were submitted to the FAA earlier this month and were approved.

This does not mean just yet that SpaceX can launch its third rocket whenever it seems fit. There are 17 corrective actions that SpaceX reported to the FAA that will need to be proven fixed before the agency will grant it a launch license modification. Many of these fixes are incremental changes and problems found during IFT-2 that the company would have had to do anyways.

Testing on the IFT-3 rocket will also need to be completed, which is back in action recently. If we compare from how long it took IFT-2 to fly after its mishap investigation was closed, a launch in March could be likely.