The launch of the Tri-Cities’ hometown astronaut on a flight toward the International Space Station on Halloween appears to be a go.
It will be the first space flight for Kayla Barron, a graduate of Richland High in Eastern Washington, who completed a NASA astronaut training program about 22 months ago.
“I think for all of us, especially the rookies on the flight, it still feels a little surreal, like we don’t really believe that we are actually going to space here, hopefully in the early hours of Sunday morning,” she said just after arriving Tuesday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
The public can watch the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance and Falcon 9 rocket launch online on NASA TV at nasa.gov/live, with coverage starting about 7 p.m. Saturday Oct. 30 and continuing through the welcoming ceremony at the International Space Station.
The launch is set for early Halloween morning in Florida, or 11:21 p.m. Saturday for those watching in the Tri-Cities. It has been moved up 22 minutes from the tentative time announced earlier.
Docking at the space station is set for 9:10 p.m. Sunday Pacific Daylight Time, followed by the opening of the hatch at 10:50 p.m. PDT and the welcoming ceremony at 11:20 p.m. PDT.
Now SpaceX Crew-3 — NASA astronauts Barron, Chari, Tom Marshburn and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer of Germany — are making final preparations to leave Earth.
The flight will be the third NASA Commercial Crew flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Thursday was scheduled to be devoted to a full dress rehearsal, with the team entering the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance and getting strapped in before it is powered up.
“(We will) basically go through as close as we can get to actual launch day without actually launching off the pad,” Raja Chari, commander of the SpaceX Crew-3 astronauts, said at a news briefing Wednesday.
Barron is a mission specialist who will monitor the launch and re-entry phases of the flight. Once on the space station, she will become a flight engineer for Expedition 66.
She will spend the six months doing research aboard the microgravity laboratory in low-Earth orbit and likely making a space walk.
She also will meet visitors to the space station, as the United States has its first mission of private astronauts on the space station. Two Japanese private citizens also will board the space station.
Practice for Moon
But perhaps most important for her is gaining experience that will be invaluable should she be picked for the next trip to the Moon.
“The opportunity to visit the space station, this incredible engineering marvel that we have been serving on continuously for two decades now, is the best possible training for us in terms of personal development and the opportunity to learn from the experienced people who we get to go to space with,” Barron said at the Wednesday news briefing.
NASA is making plans in its Artemis program to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon and to establish the first long-term presence on the Moon.
Then it will build on that experience to send the first astronauts to Mars.
Barron, who has been named to Artemis, could either make the flight to the Moon or be part of the team that supports the flight from Earth.
But most immediately, she and her crew are looking forward to some sights that not many other people have seen.
“We all are really looking forward to looking out the window down at the beautiful Earth,” she said during a news briefing earlier this month.
Athlete on a space walk
The crew also is hoping for a space walk.
“As soon as we can knock out those two things we will be pretty happy campers,” she said.
The space walk may be the most difficult task she undertakes at the space station, but her history as an athlete has helped prepare her, she said at the Wednesday news briefing.
She is a 2010 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where she competed in cross country and won honors in track.
Space walks can last for seven hours and they require “incredible mental focus” to do detailed tasks, she said.
“And it is really physical because working in the suit is hard,” she said.
Endurance sports have helped her “learn how to manage my output, how to surge when I need to, how to recover and mostly how to stay focused and rely on the people around me to push me through challenging moments,” she said.
Her background serving on the USS Maine submarine in the first class of women commissioned to be a submarine officer also has helped prepare her for life on the space station, she said.
She applied to be a National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut, winning acceptance into the training program in 2017, after realizing the similarities between life and work in a submarine and in space.
“I didn’t grow up with that specific goal in mind,” she said. “I was aware of the space program, watched shuttle launches on TV. But it was never something I could picture myself doing.”
She expects to find similarities between the experience of living beneath the surface of the ocean and and living in the vacuum of space, in both cases working with a team to accomplish an important mission, she said.
Research on space station
The crew will be taking more than 150 pounds of supplies and hardware to conduct experiments aboard the space station.
The research will be wide ranging including work in materials science, life science and technological demonstrations.
In one study, astronauts will grow a batch of nanocrystals to send back to Earth for studies on how individual genes switch on and off.
In another study, the crew will see whether the efficiency of the two and a half hours of daily exercise required at the space station can be improved with electrical muscle stimulation. The exercise is needed to prevent muscle atrophy and resulting bone loss in microgravity.
Some of the research will include using and testing systems on the space station that would be sent on a Moon mission.
Barron has prepared for her six months in space with intense physical, psychological and technical training.
But there have also been some more practical considerations, such as how to keep her hair trimmed.
She posted on her Facebook page that fellow NASA astronauts Marshburn and Chari offered to learn to cut her hair while they are aboard the space station.
Her stylist gave them a lesson, and Barron rated her crew mates’ practice attempt at hair cutting as a 10 out of 10.
“Proof that our crew trusts each other completely,” she posted.
