SpaceX’s subsequent astronaut mission for NASA will now elevate off early Thursday morning (March 2), if all goes in accordance with plan.
Elon Musk’s firm initially aimed to launch the Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) early Monday (Feb. 27) from NASA’s Kennedy Area Heart (KSC) in Florida, however a ground-system problem prompted a scrub late in the countdown.
Mission groups could not verify that the bottom system held a full load of triethylaluminum triethylboron (TEA-TEB), the ignition supply for the 9 first-stage Merlin engines of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, NASA officers mentioned in an update (opens in new tab) posted shortly after the scrub.
The climate does not look good for a Tuesday (Feb. 28) try, so SpaceX and NASA are actually eyeing the subsequent accessible window — a strive at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) on Thursday, “pending decision of the technical problem stopping Monday’s launch,” company officers wrote within the replace.
Associated: Meet the SpaceX Crew-6 astronauts launching to the International Space Station on Feb. 26
Extra: Live updates about SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission for NASA
As its identify suggests, Crew-6 is the sixth operational mission that SpaceX will launch to the ISS for NASA. Will probably be the ninth astronaut flight general for the corporate and the fourth for the Dragon capsule Endeavour.
4 individuals will experience Endeavour to orbit on Crew-6: NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and the United Arab Emirates’ Sultan Al Neyadi, who would be the first individual from the UAE to spend a six-month crew rotation on the ISS.
The quartet will change the 4 astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission, who will return to Earth about 5 days after Crew-6 arrives on the orbiting lab.
As initially scheduled, the Crew-6 launch was a part of a deliberate tripleheader for SpaceX, which additionally aimed to ship two batches of its Starlink web satellites to orbit on Monday, one from California’s Vandenberg Area Drive Base and one from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is subsequent door to KSC.
However the Starlink plans have modified as nicely: Unhealthy climate pushed the Vandenberg launch to no sooner than Tuesday. The Florida Starlink launch remains to be on for Monday, with a focused liftoff time of 6:13 p.m. EST (2313 GMT). You may watch that right here at Area.com, courtesy of SpaceX, when the time comes.
Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e book 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).
