© Reuters. A Falcon 9 rocket is readied before launch on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission, which will carry four crew members to the International Space Station, from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, February 26, 2023. REUTERS/Joe Skipper
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By Joe Skipper and Steve Gorman
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) – Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX will launch the next long-duration crew from the International Space Station into orbit early on Monday, with an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates and a Russian cosmonaut joining them. two NASA crewmates for the flight.
The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously-operating Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, lifted off at 1:45 am EST (0645 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cabo Canaveral, Florida.
The four-member crew should arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) about 25 hours later, Tuesday morning, to begin a six-month mission in microgravity aboard the orbiting laboratory some 250 miles (420 km) away. on Earth.
Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-term ISS crew NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the private rocket company founded by Musk, the billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla (NASDAQ:) and the social networking platform Twitter, began sending American astronauts. in orbit in May 2020.
NASA said the mission’s launch readiness review was completed on Saturday and the flight was given a chance to proceed to liftoff as planned.
“All systems and weather looking good for launch,” Musk wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
The latest ISS crew is led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a former US Navy submarine officer who has logged more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three ISS flights. space shuttle and seven spacewalks.
Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator designated as the Crew 6 pilot, will make his first spaceflight.
The Crew 6 mission is also notable for the inclusion of UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly into space and the first to launch from US soil as part of a space station crew from Long duration. The first astronaut from the United Arab Emirates was launched into orbit in 2019 aboard a Russian spacecraft.
Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 is Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 41, who like Alneyadi is an engineer and spaceflight rookie designated as a mission specialist for the team.
Fedyaev is the last cosmonaut to fly aboard a US spacecraft under a shared ride agreement signed in July by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite rising tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Crew 6 will be welcomed aboard the space station by seven current ISS occupants: three US NASA crew members, including Commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly in space , along with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.
The ISS, the length of a football field and the largest man-made object in space, has been continuously operated by a US-Russian led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
The outpost was conceived in part as an undertaking to improve relations between Washington and Moscow following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War rivalries that led to the original US-Union space race. Soviet in the 1950s and 1960s.
NASA-Roscosmos cooperation has been tested like never before since Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago, prompting the United States to impose sweeping sanctions against Moscow while steadily increasing military aid to the Ukrainian government.
The Crew 6 mission also follows two recent mishaps in which the Russian spacecraft docked with the orbiting laboratory and caused coolant leaks that apparently caused micrometeoroids, tiny grains of space rock, to streak through space and hit the craft at high speed.
One of the affected Russian vehicles was a Soyuz crewed capsule that had transported two cosmonauts and one astronaut to the space station in September for a six-month mission that will now end in March. An empty replacement Soyuz to take them home lifted off on Friday and arrived at the space station on Saturday.