spacetoday.net: NASA assigns astronauts to SpaceX commercial crew flight

Posted: Fri, Apr 3, 2020, 2:36 PM ET (1836 GMT)
SpaceX Crew Dragon launch illustration (SpaceX)

NASA has assigned two more astronauts to the first operational SpaceX commercial crew flight. NASA astronaut Shannon Walker and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi will fly on the Crew-1 mission, joining NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Vic Glover, who were assigned to the mission in 2018. A date for that mission has not been set, and will depend on when the Demo-2 crewed test flight takes place and its outcome. No Russian cosmonauts were assigned to the mission despite desires previously expressed by NASA for "mixed crews" on both Soyuz and commercial crew flights, which would ensure there would be at least one American and one Russian on the station in the event one vehicle was unavailable. At an International Space Station Advisory Committee meeting Monday, chairman Tom Stafford said Roscosmos officials did not want to assign cosmonauts to commercial crew flights until there had been successful launches of them.