Hi friends, your Space Coast correspondent James Sparvero here, writing to you after getting home from Sunday night’s spectacular launch of the next crew that will live on the International Space Station.
Crew-8 was delayed a couple of times because of weather and then Sunday night, within 10 minutes of the launch, a crack in a seal of the hatch of the capsule almost set the mission back again.
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In covering all of the Commercial Crew Program missions so far over the past four years, I can’t remember a more tense couple of minutes as we waited for the call out at the T-10 minute mark if the crack was going to be a big enough issue to call off the launch again. The crack actually wasn’t a concern for the launch itself, but for the heat of reentry.
Then, came the good news. SpaceX told the crew engineers the crack was too small to be a threat and the countdown continued, turning night into day at Kennedy Space Center when the clock hit T-zero.
Matt Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps and Alex Grebenkin are expected to arrive at the space station around 3 a.m. Tuesday. They relieve the Crew-7 team that launched last year, and they should stay very busy as NASA says they have more than 200 science experiments to work on!
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👋 Here’s a little bit more about me.
Little did I know when watching Apollo 13 in the third grade that 20 years later, I was destined for a thrilling career as your Space Coast multimedia journalist.
Chemistry and biology weren’t so interesting to me in high school science, but I loved my Earth and Space class (Thanks, Mr. Lang).
Then in 2016, I traded Capitol correspondent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for space correspondent. I’m proud that my first live report at News 6 happened to be the first time SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster on a barge. What seems so routine now was a really big deal that day in our newsroom!
From there, I’ve covered the Commercial Crew program and the return of human spaceflight to Kennedy Space Center (Demo-2 launched on my 33rd birthday!)
Now, as our coverage looks forward to missions to the moon and Mars, I often tell others I have the best job in local news. Because after all I’ve seen so far, I think I would be bored working somewhere else. I even bought a house near the Cape with a great view to the north so I never miss a launch even when I’m not working.
After seven years on the beat, though, I still consider myself a young space reporter and I always look forward to learning something new with every assignment.
Have a great launch into the rest of your week!