SpaceX’s subsequent astronaut mission will launch late subsequent month, if all goes in keeping with plan.
SpaceX and NASA have circled Feb. 26 (opens in new tab) for the launch of Crew-6, which is able to ship 4 spaceflyers to the International Space Station (ISS) for a roughly six-month keep. That date is a slight push from the earlier target of mid-February.
Crew-6 will ship the SpaceX Dragon capsule Endeavour aloft atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which is able to launch from NASA’s Kennedy House Middle in Florida.
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The mission is so named as a result of it is going to be the six contracted astronaut flight that SpaceX flies to the ISS for NASA. However Crew-6 will truly be the ninth crewed orbital mission for Elon Musk‘s firm total.
Along with the Crew-1 by Crew-5 missions, SpaceX additionally flew the Demo-2 take a look at flight and personal Ax-1 mission to the orbital lab in 2020 and 2022, respectively, and the personal Inspiration4 mission to Earth orbit in September 2021.
The Crew-6 mission is extremely worldwide. Its crewmembers are NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Sultan Al Neyadi and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Bowen and Hoburg have been on the Crew-6 manifest since December 2021. Fedyaev got here aboard in July 2022 as part of a crew swap agreement between NASA and Russia’s federal space company, Roscosmos. That very same month, Al Neyadi turned the mission’s fourth and closing crewmate.
Al Neyadi’s seat on Crew-6 got here by way of a 2021 contract between NASA and Axiom House, the Houston-based firm that organized and operated the Ax-1 mission.
“To make sure steady U.S. presence aboard the Worldwide House Station, NASA signed a contract in 2021 with Axiom House to fly a NASA astronaut on a Soyuz rotation in trade for a seat on a future U.S. industrial spacecraft,” NASA officers wrote in a blog post last July (opens in new tab). (Soyuz is Russia’s workhorse crewed spacecraft, which has been flying astronauts to orbit for many years.)
“Axiom introduced an settlement on April 29, 2022, with the Mohammed bin Rashid House Middle of the UAE to fly its crew member within the seat,” company officers added.
Crew-6 will briefly overlap with SpaceX’s Crew-5, which launched to the ISS this previous October. The 4 astronauts of Crew-5 will return to Earth shortly after Crew-6’s arrival on the station, NASA officers mentioned just lately.
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