Video: Halloween liftoff of Atlas 5 with GPS 2F-11

Crew Dragon commander Mike Hopkins, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi flew to the Kennedy Space Center on a NASA-chartered private jet Sunday, ready for a final week of training, refresher courses, and some time off before their launch to the International Space Station.

A malfunction during a drop test over Nevada last month for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon program has engineers re-examining the crew capsule’s parachutes, and Boeing has also encountered parachute failures during testing for its commercial crew capsule, a senior NASA official confirmed Wednesday.

Technicians began the painstaking work of assembling a powerful Atlas 5 rocket today, a launcher that will deploy an advanced satellite to substantially improve U.S. weather forecasting.