NASA and SpaceX target late September for next astronaut launch

New York (CNN Business)NASA and SpaceX are aiming to follow their historic Crew Dragon test flight in May with SpaceX's first operational astronaut launch in mid- to late September. Three US astronauts — Victor Glover, Michael Hopkins and Shannon Walker — will join Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut with the Japanese space agency, JAXA, on a mission to the International Space Station that will take off from SpaceX's launch site in Florida "no earlier than" September 14, NASA announced this week. The mission, dubbed Crew-1, will be the first fully operational flight of SpaceX's Crew Dragon, a gumdrop-shaped spacecraft developed by Elon Musk's exploration company designed to ferry NASA astronauts —...