SpaceX’s Crew-6 astronaut mission is scheduled to reach on the Worldwide House Station (ISS) early Friday morning (March 3), and you may watch the meetup reside.
Crew-6’s Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) on Thursday (March 2) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy House Middle in Florida.
If all goes based on plan, Endeavour will catch as much as the ISS on Friday at 1:17 a.m. EST (0617 GMT). You may watch the rendezvous reside right here at House.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency (opens in new tab).
Protection is anticipated to start at 11:30 p.m. EST on Thursday (0430 GMT on Friday). It’ll proceed for some time, displaying the opening of the hatches between the ISS and Endeavour round 2:55 a.m. EST (0755 GMT) and the welcome ceremony for the Crew-6 astronauts at 3:40 a.m. EST (0840 GMT) or so.
Associated: Live updates about SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission for NASA
Endeavour is carrying a crew of 4 to the orbiting lab for a six-month mission — NASA astronauts Woody Hoburg and Stephen Bowen, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Sultan Al Neyadi and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
All are spaceflight rookies besides Bowen, who’s the Crew-6 commander. Al Neyadi will change into the primary particular person from the UAE to spend a long-duration stint aboard the ISS.
Crew-6 will overlap, albeit briefly, with one other SpaceX mission in orbit — Crew-5, which arrived on the ISS in early October. The Crew-5 quartet — NASA’s Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Koichi Wakata of Japan and cosmonaut Anna Kikina — are scheduled to return to Earth about 5 days after Crew-6 arrives.
The Crew-5 astronauts aren’t alone on the ISS for the time being. Additionally dwelling on the orbiting lab are NASA’s Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, who arrived in September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The trio’s Soyuz sprang a coolant leak in mid-December, rendering it unfit to hold the spaceflyers house besides in case of emergency. So Russia’s space company, Roscosmos, launched an uncrewed replacement Soyuz last month to be their trip again to Earth.
That trip will now happen in late September or so, which means that Rubio, Propkopyev and Petelin will spend six extra months on the ISS than initially deliberate.
Mike Wall is the writer of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e book in regards to the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab), or on Facebook (opens in new tab) and Instagram (opens in new tab).
