Two American astronauts, an Emirati and a Russian cosmonaut were en route on Thursday, aboard a SpaceX capsule, to the International Space Station, where they are to arrive following a journey of regarding 24 hours and stay regarding six months.
The SpaceX rocket took off Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:34 a.m. local time (0534 GMT).
The Dragon capsule in which the four passengers are traveling is due to dock with the space station (ISS) on Friday at 1:17 am US east coast time (06:17 GMT).
The crew, dubbed Crew-6, is made up of NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi, and Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fediaev.
Sultan al-Neyadi, 41, becomes the fourth astronaut from an Arab country in history, the second Emirati, and he will be the first from his country to spend six months in space.
Moreover, even if tensions between Washington and Moscow are at their highest a year following the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, the two countries have maintained an exchange program allowing Russians to travel with SpaceX, and Americans to travel aboard Russian Soyuz rockets. The space station is one of the few fields of cooperation still in progress between the two countries.
“Crew-6 will be busy aboard the International Space Station, conducting 200 experiments that will help prepare us for missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond,” Crew-6 CEO Bill Nelson said in a statement. The NASA.
Monday, the takeoff had been canceled at the last minute due to a technical problem. NASA explained on Wednesday that the problem concerned the routing of a liquid used for the ignition of the engines, caused by a “clogged filter”. The latter had been replaced before takeoff on Thursday.
Crew-6 will replace the four members of Crew-5 (two Americans, a Russian and a Japanese), who arrived in October 2022 and who will return to Earth aboard their own SpaceX ship, following a few days of handover.
Three other passengers (two Russians and an American) are also on board the space station, they arrived with a Soyuz spacecraft. The ISS will therefore welcome no less than 11 people for a few days.
NASA pays SpaceX services to fly its astronauts approximately every six months to the flying lab.
They conduct scientific experiments there and ensure the maintenance of the station, which has been permanently inhabited for more than 22 years.
Crew-6 is the sixth crew to visit the ISS on a regular rotational mission operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s company.
