A SpaceX astronaut taxi has made it to the launch web site forward of this weekend’s deliberate liftoff.
The Dragon capsule Endeavour is now at Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy House Middle in Florida, the corporate introduced via Twitter on Sunday (opens in new tab) (Feb. 19), in a publish that included two photographs of the spacecraft.
Endeavour is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Pad 39A at 2:07 a.m. EST (0707 GMT) on Feb. 26, kicking off the corporate’s Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. You possibly can watch the liftoff right here at House.com, courtesy of NASA.
Associated: Meet the SpaceX Crew-6 astronauts
Crew-6 will ship 4 astronauts to the ISS for a roughly six-month keep. These crewmembers are NASA’s Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, the United Arab Emirates’ Sultan Al-Neyadi and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Al-Neyadi will make historical past, changing into the primary Arab astronaut ever to conduct a long-duration mission aboard the orbiting lab. (His countryman Hazzaa Ali Almansoori visited the ISS in 2019 however spent solely eight days off Earth.)
Endeavour is scheduled to dock with the ISS early on the morning of Feb. 27, roughly 24 hours after liftoff. The capsule will be part of one other Dragon on the orbiting lab — Endurance, which is flying SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission for NASA.
The 2 SpaceX flights will not overlap in orbit for lengthy. Endurance is slated to depart just a few days after Endeavour’s arrival, carrying the Crew-5 astronauts — NASA’s Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japanese spaceflyer Koichi Wakata and Russian Anna Kikina — again all the way down to Earth.
Crew-6 would be the fourth astronaut mission to the ISS for Endeavour. The capsule additionally flew Demo-2 in 2020, SpaceX’s first-ever crewed flight; Crew-2 in 2021; and Ax-1, the first-ever all-private crewed mission to the orbiting lab, in April 2022.
Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a guide concerning the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
