SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule ‘Endeavour’ arrives at pad ahead of July 31 astronaut launch (photos)

SpaceX just took a big step toward its next astronaut launch.

The company announced Thursday (July 24) that it has moved its Crew Dragon capsule “Endeavour” to the hangar at historic Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Endeavour is scheduled to launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Pad 39A — the liftoff site of most Apollo moon missions, including Apollo 11 — on July 31, kicking off SpaceX’s Crew-11 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA.

Crew-11 will send four people to the ISS for a six-month stint: NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, along with Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Oleg Platonov of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos. It will be the first spaceflight for Cardman and Platonov, the second for Yui and the fourth for Fincke.

The quartet will relieve the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission, who have been living on the orbiting lab since March 16 and will depart a few days after Crew-11 arrives.

Crew-11 will be the sixth mission for Endeavour, which shares its name with one of NASA’s retired space shuttles. Endeavour has flown more astronaut missions than any other SpaceX capsule, and it was the first company vehicle to do so as well; Endeavour flew Demo-2, SpaceX’s first-ever crewed flight, a test mission that sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS in 2020.

As its name suggests, Crew-11 will be the 11th operational astronaut mission that SpaceX flies to the ISS for NASA. But the company has a number of other crewed flights under its belt as well.

There’s Demo-2, for example. SpaceX has also launched four astronaut flights to the ISS for Houston-based company Axiom Space and two free-flying crewed missions to Earth orbit. These latter two, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn, were funded and commanded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who until recently was President Donald Trump’s choice to lead NASA.

Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.