news and others, check out axios.com/local. thank you for joining and we will see you at axios.com. check out our website for complete coverage on coronavirus, featured interactive gallery, future clips, house and senate speeches, congressional airings, briefings and more. it is all at c-span.org/coronavirus. after the launch of space exit dragon was delayed due to weather, nasa officials held everything to review that mission. a four person crew is headed to the international space station for six months eared toff is scheduled for today, at 7:27 p.m. kyle: hello, everybody, and welcome from the kennedy space center in florida. i would like to welcome everyone

to the traditional prelaunch news conference ahead of the falcon and crew 1 dragon launch to the iss. here to provide all the details are folks that were part of the review today and also have been part of the preparations that led up to this moment as an exciting day for everybody in nasa and spacex. an everyone tuning in today. let me introduce the panel, and i will let each one of them give you some words before we take questions. steve stich. he is the nasa manager for the commercial crew program here at kennedy. also joel montalbano, the nasa manager of the international space station program at johnson space center in houston. norm knight, the deputy manager of flight operations director at johnson. also joining us is benji reed, the senior director of human spaceflight programs at spacex.

we are glad to have him with us. also, kirt costello, the nasa iss program chief scientist at johnson space center. and arlena moses, the launch weather officer for the u.s. air force 45th weather squadron. i know everyone is looking forward to hearing from arlena as well. with that, i will turn it over to steve and let him take it from there. steve: thank you. it is great to be here, following the launch readiness review today. it has been a busy few days. since we talked on tuesday, we have put the falcon 9 vehicle through a static fire, an important test for us to check out the rocket, to make sure all the 9 engines on f9 and all the systems on the rocket were functioning as expected. we reviewed all of that data over the last few days, and the rocket looks really good. it was important for us to also do inspections after that, the static fire.

we swapped out a couple of engines on the vehicle and did those inspections, and everything looks really good. we also did a dry dress practice with the crew. the crew suited up, got in their spacesuits, went out to the launchpad, and got installed in the vehicle. it is the first time we have put four people in dragon. so that was an important test for us. and that test went really, really well. overall, in terms of looking at the weather and also looking at recovery of the booster for this flight, we have adjusted the launch date. we were targeting a saturday launch. we adjusted it 24 hours later. today we are targeting a sunday lunch at 7:27 eastern time. that will put docking at monday at 11:00 p.m. eastern time. we looked carefully at the weather. the onshore flow looked not so good saturday. also, we needed to get the drone recovery ship in place to recover the booster for nasa and spacex.

this booster is very important for us. we will use the first stage we are flying on crew one for the crew two system that has a launch date of march 30. it is important to recover that booster so we needed to get the drone ship in place. overall, it will be an exciting flight. crew-1 will be the longest u.s. spaceflight ever, exceeding what we had on the final skylab mission. skylab three. it is a first mission to have four crew in the capsule, which we are excited about, to enhance the science on the space station. and it is our first licensed launch by the faa as well. as we move into this next step. so we are excited to fly this mission for the space station program. we will continue to watch the weather and the vehicles. we are looking forward to a good launch on sunday. joel: thank you, steve. welcome again to today's press brief. these last few days, we have had a number of reviews and

operations, and today, as we concluded the launch readiness, i can tell you the international space station partnership is ready for this mission. looking at a launch time of 7:27 p.m. eastern time on sunday, giving us a docking late monday evening, approximately 11:00 p.m. eastern time. shortly after docking, we will do the standard leak checks and then we will have a welcome ceremony on board. that will be about two and half hours after docking. this week, we have been doing a lot of discussion with kate and sergei on orbit today, keeping them up to speed with the preparations. they are excited and ready to have new crewmembers on board. this vehicle is also bringing approximately 240 kilograms of pressurized cargo to enhance what we are doing on board the international space station. with these four crewmembers, adding to the three crew members

on board, we will have a total of seven iss crew members. for a sustained increment. this vehicle will stay for a long duration increment and return in april of next year. we look forward to having the extra capability on board which will allows to increase the science we do and increase the expiration development we do for the artemis program and future programs. we also, this year, our celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on board the international space station. during those 20 years, we set the standard for international cooperation. and international operations. but we keep learning. we learn every day. and nasa, with american industry, has developed these commercial vehicles that will allow us to bring more people to low earth orbit, to the international space station, and allow us to bring more science,

and allow more commercial opportunities. with that, a huge thanks to the commercial crew program, to spacex for getting us where we are today. the international space station partnership is glad to be here. we are excited for launch on sunday. we are looking forward to monday's docking and to the long duration increment. norm: thank you, joel. the launch readiness review went very well today. stepping back and reflecting on demo 2 and the development cycle now to the operational cycle, , just with the journey leading up to this ,and the lrr, it was evident there was great improvement on the overall readiness level from the team on this vehicle. so it was very encouraging. an absolute focus on crew safety and vehicle safety, which both the nasa and spacex teams have done a great job with. we are satisfied with that. this was on the heels of dry dress yesterday that steve

mentioned. that went really well. that was the first opportunity to let the crew suit up and really try out their vehicle for the first time, before launch day, to make sure the fit was right and there were no last-minute type things that needed to be tweaked. that went very well. we are very excited about that. we had an opportunity to meet with the crew this morning and talk with them about their upcoming launch. they were absolutely excited. you can just feel the radiant excitement coming off of them. when i walked out of the briefing, i was excited myself. you could just feel the energy from the crew. we see that throughout the team, which is great, because it means we are real close and ready to go, which is very important. the message that they wanted to

convey is resilience, and to echo once again the journey to get here is one of resilience. and it was a hard journey with a lot of stuff going on, covid affecting the teams, but it was that resilience and determination by a lot of folks that led up to this point. we will safely get them into orbit and we will safely get them docked, performing six months of science, and returning back to earth safely as well. again, a lot of folks involved with that. and just an appreciation for that hard work that has got us to this point. with that, i will turn it over to benji and look forward to questions later. benji: thank you very much, norm. first of all, sitting here, i am excited, again, to be here. to think this is our third time we had the opportunity to come and launch here from kennedy space center. we did our in-flight test at the

beginning of this year. we did our demo 2 mission, and now we are coming up here with crew-1, our first operational mission to provide crewed services to the station. to keep joel's program running at six-month intervals. briefingtch the press you saw the montage of all the , different, past crewed missions. to talk about 20 years in space. it is so cool and an honor to get to be here. i am stoked. on behalf of all the spacex employees, our vendors, our partners, all of our families, i want to take this opportunity to say thank you to nasa, and to all of our partners, to let us be part of this and to help carry this sacred honor and responsibility on our shoulders. this is the culmination of years

of work and effort, from a lot of people, and a lot of time. and we have built what i would call the safest launch and spacecraft launch vehicles ever. we culminated our efforts in that with our static fire wednesday. i think we have a video to show for that. [video clip] [sound of explosion] that was a full seven second duration static fire. the teams look at all the data coming out of the static fire. they finished that up, we did joint reviews with the nasa teams and our teams, and it looked great. we assessed everything that came from the vehicle and feel very good about it. we did some work on the engines and other aspects of the

vehicle as we were getting ready for the launch. and that static fire is key. and those seven seconds look awesome. the next thing i want to show is a picture from dry dress, the dress rehearsal with the crew. they do the whole thing, where they get suited up at the building. what they call the onc building here at kennedy space center. they come across in their teslas and go up the tower and get all the way into dragon. it is a very important process we do, where we walk through all of that with our teams, the ground teams, the crew themselves, make sure everything checks out. when i look at this picture, again, i get very excited to think about this next step on this big journey we have ahead of us. we have four astronauts who will be going up. we have one person who has never been to space, victor, who is very excited. we have soichi, our first international partner, who will be joining us, which will be really, really cool.

let's talk about what will happen on launch day itself, as i talked about, dry dress as a practice for that. four hours before launch day, the crew will be getting suited up. our suit techs will be helping them get ready. we will do various leak and fit checks. the astronauts will come out about three hours before launch, they will get into the teslas, wave goodbye to their families and all their friends who are there, and come across to the launch pad. they will go up the tower, cross the arm, and about two and half hours before launch, they will enter the vehicle. they will get inside the vehicle. they will get all strapped in and safe. at approximately -- about 45 minutes before launch is when we

will do the final go poll for loading the vehicle and for arming the escape system. we have a launch escape system on dragon that is ready to go, just in case. if something goes wrong with the launch vehicle, dragon can get the crew to safety in the ocean. so that will be armed. at that point, about 30 minutes before launch, is when we start loading the launch vehicle with propellants. and we are off. let's go next to our line drawing. this gives you a sense of what it looks like and we are actually doing launch. i will not go through all the details, but some of the highlights here. about two minutes and 40 seconds, we have our first and second stage separation. after that happens, the first stage will land on the drone ship, which is heading out right now to be in position to be ready for that.

and in the second stage, we will continue to carry dragon into orbit. about eight minutes and 50 seconds, the engine will cut out. then dragon will separate, and they are off on their journey to the station. in the next line drawing, we get a sense of what it looks like. phrasing is this process where we are catching up with the space station. you know, the space station is zooming around the earth very fast. so is dragon. you are kind of using this game where you are using gravity and the behavior of orbital mechanics as well as minimizing the fuel to get the vehicles to catch up. and to get the two vehicles to come together. so we call this process phasing. based on the orbital mechanics, the time on the day of launch, this particular phasing time will take about 25 hours. in we will be close to where we 25 hours need to be to be in position to come up to the station.

and a few hours after that, we will have docked to the space station. i will talk about what happens once they dock. the crew docks on station. and they will come through and be welcomed by the other crew up there and start to get to work very quickly. two things that involve spacex that will be happening during their six months on station. one is coming up in a few weeks, we have our first cargo dragon 2 vehicle. that will be our crs 21 mission heading up. and that is full of science for the crew-1 crew to be working on . for the first few weeks after they have docked they will be , getting ready for that, they will be wrapping up other work, and preparing. they will be spending a lot of time working on the critical science going on there. and then near the end of their time, at the end of the the six months or so, we will be sending up another dragon, so the crew-2 dragon will go up, with another

four astronauts on board, and that dragon will go up, docked to the station. be a handoff and the crew will see each other and , about a week later, our crew-1 crew will come home. so let's take a look at what that will look like in a line drawing. you see here we do another departure, both the docking and undocking is fully automated. at any time during that docking, the astronauts are able to take control. both astronauts on the vehicle and iss drink docking and undocking are watching closely everything that is happening. we want to make sure everything is happening correctly. as we move away from station, we get into position to actually start our phasing to come home the same process. , we need to phase to make sure we hit the right spot on the earth at the right time for a splashdown. after that happens, our recovery crews will come out, and they

will be meeting the crew. we have a large recovery vessel, plus a couple of fast boats, who -- fast boats. the fast boats will go out and meet the crew. the first thing they will do is check the area, make sure everything is safe for approach. the second will check for parachutes. then we will go ahead with our larger vehicle, which will pull dragon out of the water. one of the things i want to mention, as we talk about this recovery process. we know everybody is very excited about launch and very excited about recovery and human spaceflight in general. we ask everyone involved, if you come out to watch the launch or any of the different operations we are doing, to please wear the mask and do all those social -- please wear your mask and follow all of the social distancing guidelines. and during recovery, we ask all of the boaters pay good

attention to what the navy and coast guard regulations are and what their advisories will be. it is very important we keep all of our recovery crews and the astronauts themselves safe. i want to take one more moment to do a couple of important things. one, i want to thank all of the spacex'ers and their families and all our different teams and partners who have been involved in this effort to get as here. -- to get us here. it is a very big team. part of certification, as we have gone through and talked about the other day, that nasa certify all of our systems for human space flight, that certification means a lot. it represents the countless hours and hours of work put in by all of these teams. it is dragon, falcon, the ground teams, the launch site teams, the factory it is all of our , hardware and software operators, everybody. all of them put their time in,

sacrificed, and done dedication the needed. the same is true for all of our vendors and partners. so, a big thank you. finally, a very important special thank you to the astronauts who will be flying, victor, mike, shannon, and soichi. we thank you for the trust we have put into space x to get you there and bring you home safely. thank you on behalf of all of us. kyle: now we will hear about the science and the reason these guys are actually going up there. kirt: thank you. as joel mentioned, it was less than two weeks ago that we were celebrating 20 years of continuous crewed presence on orbit. we were not celebrating an ending but really just the end of the beginning. the launch coming up, with additional crew members to the iss, is the start of a new era for research and discovery on board.

the capabilities of the crewed dragon, bringing additional crew and samples back to the site here at ksc are an amazing capability. we hope to double the amount of crew time going into science and research. we will have easier access for those examples when they come back to earth. and we will have easier access to our crew members, both pre-and post flight, to conduct some of our human research. we do have several investigations going up on this flight. we have about 28 kilograms of payloads going up. some of those experiments will be going up for soichi, to include education and public outreach experiments for him. then we have a student experiment called genes in space-7, which will be looking at the humble fruit fly and how

it adapts on orbit to changes in circadian rhythm. circadian rhythm is our sensitivity to the day and night cycle here on earth. and if you can imagine, on orbit, when you have 16 day-night cycles every day, it can be a bit confusing to the body. fruit flies are great model organisms. they help us understand what is going on in the human body, because they share about 75% of the genes that cause disease in the human body. so we will be looking at those. last, but not least, our astronauts are members of our human research team. they will be conducting a number of experiments on themselves, both before, during, and after the mission. one of those is food physiology, looking at whether nutritional changes in the astronauts' diet can be beneficial for preventing

space flight impairments we typically see in orbit. again, for mike, victor, soichi, and especially my old alum from rice, shannon, godspeed. and thank you so much for the amount of hard work and research you will be putting in. kyle: thanks, kirt. now the topic everyone likes to talk about is the weather. so let's turn it over to arlena and have her give us the launch weather forecast. arlena: in florida, we have been plagued by tropical storm eta for most of the upcoming weekend. it was a little uncertain at first if this would clear out, but thankfully, eta is well out to sea and moving further with time. and with its passage, going through a bit of a cold front in florida -- i know it does not really feel like that right now.

still warm and humid but . but overall, it will give us a pretty good shot for weather for our primary launch day. if we take a look here at the forecast, we are looking right now at a no go weather probability of 40% with the weak front that came through a couple days ago. it will kind of creep back north towards us. and it will keep our winds light and variable. so the on chart when component not as much of a concern for lunch sunday. but we are going to see a few showers in the area with some cumulus clouds. also with the concern for flying both the rocket and the dragon capsule through any precipitation, any of those showers that may be out there during the launch time. if we take a look at our backup window, going into wednesday -- a couple days later, we dry out quite a bit. a nice area of high pressure.

we get a true florida cold front coming through, temperatures cool for us here in florida. our rain chances drop quite a bit. so we only have concern for a few clouds. the downside is, however, the wind will be coming from the northeast a little stronger on that particular day, but that is something that we will be monitoring with the weather. so good luck, everybody. we will be here, doing our part with the weather to make sure we launch successfully. kyle: great. thanks a lot. we are ready for questions. there is a lot of people in the queue, as you can imagine. it has also been a long day and we have about a half an hour or so for question and answer. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] i will call on you by name and affiliation. and if you can, try to limit your question to one, like one part question. [laughter] so we can try to get to as many

folks as we can on the line. first up is marsha dunn, associated press. >> yes, hi. hoping you can hear me. for steve, what is nasa's latest thinking of elon being allowed into the launch control for his latest lab test negative, and >> we have a little bit of an audio problem. kyle: i think marsha's question, and i do not know who this would be directed to, is there a concern relative to the covid concern that elon musk raised earlier via tweet?

norm: i will jump in and start on that one. as was in the news today, it was reported that elon took several covid tests, and that stirred up a bunch of questions relative to health and potential contamination. what i can tell you is nasa and our commercial partners have a health stabilization plan in place. it is a protocol that protects the flight crew from any disease or illness, because if they are compromised, that can affect and jeopardize the mission. we pay a lot of attention to that and have done that over many years. this is something that has been in place back in the apollo time frame and the shuttle and station missions as well.

how we do this is obviously the crew is, when they come close to launch, are put in quarantine. the self-quarantine is around 21 days, where they are really starting to isolate, reduce their movement, their exposure to other folks. then, at 14 days to launch, we call it a hard quarantine, where they are totally isolated and really watched closely by the docs. so that is the protocol in place for the crew. in addition to that, that protocol also is for all folks who have contact with the crew. what we do is we train our personnel, both our personnel and spacex personnel come in this case, for what these protocols are. we make sure that we understand hygiene, social distancing, mask requirements when around the crew.

you have to have certain protocols met before you can get close to the crew, whether training the crew or getting them prepped for launch. and those people also, depending on the level of contact they have with the crew, are covid tested to make sure they are safe. again, that access is very restricted. you can think of it as concentric circles with the crew at the center, and as a circles go out, those protocols change relative to the contact people have with the crew. if any of those personnel in that ring or any in the ring come up with any covid-type symptoms, they are tested, and we do contact tracing to make sure we knew who they were around and what impact that could possibly have to the team. so again, we have a health stabilization plan in place, and it has worked effectively for many years, just like it is working today. benji, would you like to add any specific words for the spacex

team? benji: sure. absolutely. it is important to remember we have thousands of people working at spacex, and it takes all of those people to launch the dragon spacecraft. it is important we understand that any one of our team members, if they do have covid or get a test or whatever, then we work through that. and we have all of the protections in place that we do to maintain, to make sure that everybody is safe, certainly in the case of our launches and in the case of the crew, that everybody is safe, that we do the contact tracing, and i can assure everyone we are looking good for the crew-1 launch and all the critical personnel involved. norm: and for the hsp, it is restricted access. no one is above this access. it does not matter if you already elon musk or jim bridenstine. if any of those protocols are

compromised, we will not let you near the crew to protect the mission. everyone recognizes that. it is no surprise. kyle: thanks to you both. i think we have the audio problem fixed. we will go to abc news. ok, let's go to the next one. let's try cbs news. >> can you hear me? kyle: yeah. >> great. i am not sure who this is for, but a quick question, and if you have already covered this, i apologize in advance. was part of the issue today the expected weather in the recovery zone? in other words, was the forecast to be out of limits or was the

forecast favorable for if the drone ship could get there in time or was it both? benji: fundamentally, this was an issue of getting the drone ship there in time. the weather was such, with a tropical storm, that we couldn't get the drone ship to leave in time to get there. we just cannot get the speed up to get there that we were hoping to to get the saturday launch. we were able to leave port yesterday around midday, and now we will get there in plenty of time for a sunday launch. kyle: next is paul brickman, united press international. go ahead. >> thank you for taking my call. can you hear me? kyle: yes, sir. >> my question is about the change. if one of you could walk us through, i guess norm or benji, about what happens when you delay a launch by a day like this, and a crewed launch, does

anything have to be done to the capsule? i am assuming no more fuel has to be added for a longer flight, but does the crew have to reattach their cargo in a different way or anything like that, if they are going to be in-flight longer than they thought they would? norm: benji, why don't you start with the vehicle and the crew. benji: absolutely. for the vehicle, there is really nothing different we do. we do the tests in the weeks up to launch, and now we do tests like the flight readiness reviews. all of these are a go for launch tomorrow. the only thing that is not a go is having the drone ship in position. that is key. there is really nothing we do other than continue to check and double check and triple check.

all of our engineers will be looking at data, ensuring everything is ready to go to take the crew safely. also, it will be a good opportunity for people to catch up on rest. norm: from a crew standpoint, whether they are getting there in 8 hours or 21 hours, it is pretty much the same. their timeline will change, because for a saturday launch, they would have stayed up and pressed through docking. for sunday, it is a flight day 2 launch, so the crew will go to sleep in dragon and wake up and then jump into the rendezvous profile to prepare them to dock for station. and the timing on that, there could be cargo that has to come off or science to be refreshed, but i do not think that is the case. kyle: next is science.com.

-- space.com. >> thanks. my question is also for norm, about the extended trip for the crew-1 astronauts. on the last flight, with demo 2, with the lengthy trip, we saw a glimpse into what life on the crewed dragon was like. i am curious, with this added time, what we can expect to see from the astronauts on this one. will we get a tour, a taste of what that will be like on monday, prior to their arrival? norm: the crew gets prepped, go up in the vehicle, get launched, and obviously, once they get into orbit, they will do a series of orbital burns to get

them set up for that phasing to get to station. the crew has a timeline. we can get you information on it. i do not know if there are any press briefings in that time, but the crew is in constant contact with the ground. i am sure you will be hearing from them relative to that. they go to sleep -- they have a standard sleep period. they wake up, after sleeping in dragon, and start getting prepped. eat breakfast, get situated, start prepping for the day. it is a very important day, that you start doing those critical burns, getting ready for the rendezvous profile, to get set up for docking. there is time in that day, if anything goes wrong, and once they are on station, they utilize that time to really learn about the station.

learn what to do in case of an emergency and learn how to use a lot of the facilities on the station that will be very important once they are docked. i do not know if you have anything to add? benji: sure. it gives them opportunity to try out dragon and to be as a crew, four members, in dragon, which i assume will be exciting for them, but it will also be great for us to learn what that is. it is important to understand a four seat dragon, what that is like. i am pretty sure there are a couple of broadcast events they will be able to do in this time period. checking things out, seeing the earth go by -- i know i would love to be there too. [laughter] kyle: ok. i think reuters is next. >> thank you. a question for joel. i was wondering if you could

give us an update on what the talks with russia for mutual flights to the iss, are you envisioning some kind of bilateral agreement? and when do you think the soonest we can know when they can fly that? joel: we are looking to fly on each other's vehicles probably later in 2021, where we will have a cosmonaut on u.s. commercial vehicles and an astronaut on their vehicles. the first step is in preventing -- is called implementing an arrangement that we work on at the government level. we are working with our state department to draft that. we submitted a draft. they will review that, give us comments. once that is complete, they will

review it within their government. kyle: next question is from business insider. go ahead. >> hi. steve mentioned the other day that crew-1 is launching on an s9 with upgraded meals and that this will be their first crew, so why did demo 2 launch fly with older versions of the turbine wheels? and benji said that the crew dragon can now tolerate more weather. so i am wondering about the changes in how they make the vehicle more robust? steve: i will take that, thanks. we do have a few upgrades, flying on crew-1.

one of the things we have been working with spacex on is how do we continue to evolve this vehicle, make it better. so the composite pressure vessels on falcon 9, many have an upgraded liner. spacex improved the liner and allows use of it a little longer. the turbine wheels on this vehicle have been upgraded. it is a pretty complicated process, to design a turbine wheel. wheels are prone to, when you get to a certain setting of the throttle on the engine, you can have certain conditions set up with resonance, so these wheels are more robust, so we are happy to have that as a safety upgrade. and for landing, we made improvements to the structure, so we can handle a little more wind at the landing zone, which gives us a few more opportunities to land. so those are three upgrades on this vehicle, and you will

continue to see upgrades on crew-2 to improve safety. kyle: ok. i guess cnn, are you out there? >> i sure am. thanks so much for doing this. another covid question. i was curious if i could get insight into how the contract -- contact tracing played out, who was in charge of it. was it spacex, nasa, a joint team? in do not know if anyone can speak to, if there was something to arise, mission control, how that might play out logistically. benji: sure. the way we work, from a medical viewpoint, is we have flight surgeons, spacex company flight surgeons and nasa flight surgeons, and the entire health and human services directorate,

we all work closely together. our flight surgeons talk to the nasa flight surgeons -- in fact, ours come from nasa. they worked out not only following the health stabilization protocols that norm talked about but overall good practices, procedures, making sure to follow cdc guidelines, local guidelines, including contact tracing. these are things that, while we do things on our side, like the contact tracing ourselves and how we manage all of our staff, we will provide that data and review that with nasa, make sure everyone is feeling really good at where we are at. in terms of critical staff, like you asked, with operations in hawthorne or here at the cape, in the launch control and firing room, we have plans in place we have backup operators. they have also been at a heightened level of care. they go into a type of

quarantine themselves for a limited public involvement access, different things we do. we do a lot of temperature checks and screenings. we do a lot of checks to ensure our operators will also be ready for the launch and for the long-term mission as well. it is important to note all of the great signs that will be going on on the station require six months of work, and that means the dragon will be up for six months. we will be monitoring dragon's systems. and like how nasa is continuing to fly iss, we need to make sure all of these critical personnel are healthy for the long haul. norm: and i will just follow on, on the contact tracing, if there's any thought or any concern of compromise to the flight crew, the nasa team will be doing that contact tracing and working with our partner, spacex, to do that trace, or

wherever contractor or nasa that it came from. for the specific teams, if they have not had contact with the crew, we do not believe they have had contact with the crew, that is up to nasa or whatever specific contractor, to do those contact tracings. as benji said, the our overarching guidelines. it is all under the auspices of the health stabilization programs. it is very rigid and thorough. kyle: next up is new york times. go ahead. ok. let's see who was next in the queue. just waiting for that update. ken dropped off. suzy from business insider, is that right? >> yup, thank you.

what would the launch dates be on sunday, the most ideal, if you were to fly again, and what do the weather conditions at the splashdown sites look like? steve: i can take that question. we have a series of launch dates coming up. sunday is our prime date. we would then stand down on monday. monday, there is a spacewalk going on at the iss, so that is not a good day to go up and rendezvous and dock. tuesday is not a good day also. it is a longer rendezvous profile. the next option would be wednesday, thursday, friday, in

the middle of next week. for sunday, right now, the weather looks pretty good along the coast. what we do is protect for an escape all the way from the launchpad up into orbit, so we have weather constraints. right now, those look pretty good for monday. we have not really looked that far out to wednesday, the middle of the week, but right now, conditions look good, not only for the launch weather but also recovery weather, for the drone ship, which is important for us as well. as arlene said, we will have to watch the local weather, if we get precip or thunderstorms along the coastline. kyle: thanks, steve, thanks everybody. that leaves us best leads us to sunday. preparations for launch are ongoing. our nasa tv coverage will continue and start at 3:15 p.m. eastern time sunday. we have a comprehensive broadcast planned for you, so make sure you tune in. the launch is targeted for 7:27 p.m. eastern time.

the starting point of crew-1's adventure to the international space station is that launch 301a with that launch sunday evening, crew dragon's resilience, and the four astronauts are scheduled to dock monday as well. thanks to you guys, thanks to everybody tuning in today. and one reminder -- just keep practicing social distancing, and go crew-1. thanks again, everybody. [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> in about four hours, nasa will launch four astronauts aboard a space-x dragon capsule. next is nasa's prelaunch coverage all the way through the scheduled lift off at 7:27 eastern. the astronawi