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Thomas Pesquet Alpha mission launch campaign:
Dress rehearsal for Thomas Pesquet and mission Alpha launch
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- Title Thomas Pesquet Alpha mission launch campaign - Dress rehearsal for Thomas Pesquet and mission Alpha launch
- Length 00:06:53
- Footage Type TV Exchanges
- Additional Formats:
- Copyright ESA
- Description
Scenes from the “dry dress rehearsal”, 18 April 2021, six days before the launch of Crew-2 on the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Flying on a reused flight-proven Dragon capsule and Falcon rocket booster French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet is returning to the International Space Station on his second spaceflight. Called ‘Alpha’ the mission will see a European astronaut launch on a US spacecraft for the first time in over a decade. Thomas is flying alongside NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough and Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide on the Crew Dragon.
The dress rehearsal saw the astronauts go through all the steps done before launch at the same time of day, but without fuel in the rocket. This included suiting up, a last wave to press and family, the ride to the Launchpad 39A, taking the lift up to the top of the Flacon9 rocket and sitting the Dragon capsule for flight checks.
Launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, Thomas will be the first ESA astronaut to fly on a vehicle other than the US Space Shuttle or Russian Soyuz.
Over 200 experiments are planned during Thomas’s time in space, with 40 European ones and 12 new experiments led by France’s space agency CNES.
At the end of the Alpha mission in October, Thomas is slated to take over commandership role of the International Space Station for a brief period and welcome ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer on his first flight to space.
Latest updates on the mission can be found via @esaspaceflight on Twitter, with more details on the last steps before launch to be published on ESA’s exploration blog via thomaspesquet.esa.int.
Background information on the Alpha mission are available at www.esa.int/MissionAlpha with a brochure at www.esa.int/AlphaBrochure