SpaceX Dragon crew to blast off for ISS

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is to blast off early Monday for the Worldwide Area Station carrying two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and the second Emirati to voyage to space.

The SpaceX Dragon Crew-6 mission is ready to raise off from the Kennedy Area Heart in Florida at 1:45 am (0645 GMT). Climate circumstances are anticipated to be close to excellent.

The Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Endeavour, is scheduled to dock with the ISS at 2:38 am (0738 GMT) on Tuesday if all goes as deliberate.

NASA’s Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russia’s Andrey Fedyaev and Sultan al-Neyadi of the United Arab Emirates are to spend six months on the orbiting space station.

Neyadi, 41, would be the fourth astronaut from an Arab nation and the second from the oil-rich United Arab Emirates to journey to space; his countryman Hazzaa al-Mansoori flew an eight-day mission in 2019.

Neyadi described the upcoming mission as a “nice honor.”

Hoburg, the Endeavour pilot, and Fedyaev, the Russian mission specialist, will even be making their first space flights.

Fedyaev is the second Russian cosmonaut to fly to the ISS aboard a SpaceX rocket. NASA astronauts fly frequently to the station on Russian Soyuz capsules.

Area has remained a uncommon venue of cooperation between Moscow and Washington because the Russian offensive in Ukraine positioned the 2 capitals in sharp opposition.

Such exchanges have continued regardless of these tensions.

Bowen, a veteran of three space shuttle missions, mentioned politics not often come up whereas in space.

“We’re all professionals. We hold targeted on the mission itself,” the mission commander mentioned. “It is all the time been an important relationship we have had with cosmonauts as soon as we get to space.”

Whereas aboard the ISS, the Crew-6 members will conduct dozens of experiments together with learning how supplies burn in microgravity and researching coronary heart, mind and cartilage capabilities.

The present crew is the sixth to be transported by a SpaceX rocket to the ISS. The Endeavour capsule has flown into space 3 times.

NASA pays the non-public SpaceX firm to ferry astronauts to the flying laboratory roughly each six months.

The space company expects Crew-6 to have a handover of a number of days with the 4 members of the SpaceX Dragon Crew-5, who’ve been stationed on the ISS since October. Crew-5 will then return to Earth.

Rescue capsule

Additionally presently aboard the ISS are Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev, in addition to NASA astronaut Frank Rubio.

That they had been scheduled to return dwelling on March 28 however the cooling system of their Soyuz MS-22 capsule was broken by a tiny meteoroid in mid-December whereas docked with the ISS.

An uncrewed Russian Soyuz capsule, MS-23, took off on Friday from Kazakhstan to convey the three astronauts dwelling. They’re now scheduled to return to Earth in September.

The ISS was launched in 1998 at a time of elevated US-Russia cooperation following the Chilly Warfare space race.

Russia has been utilizing the getting old however dependable Soyuz capsules to ferry astronauts into space because the Sixties.

However lately, Russia’s space program has been beset by a litany of issues which have led to the lack of satellites and autos.

© 2023 AFP