A new crew must take off from Florida tonight for the ISS

2024-03-02 17:37:00

Three American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut are scheduled to take off overnight from Saturday to Sunday for the International Space Station, as part of the usual crew rotation aboard the flying laboratory.

Liftoff of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled for 11:16 p.m. local time (04:16 GMT Sunday) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

However, it might be postponed due to weather estimated at only 40% favorable for the launch.

The Dragon capsule which is to carry the crew, at the top of the rocket, has already been used for four previous manned missions.

The four passengers this time are the members of Crew-8, the eighth regular rotation mission provided by SpaceX for NASA.

“It seems almost routine to the untrained eye, that SpaceX sends them up there one following the other,” admitted NASA boss Bill Nelson at a press conference this week.

The American Michael Barratt is the only Crew-8 astronaut to have already visited the International Space Station (ISS).

However, it will be the first space trip for the two other Americans – Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps – as well as Russian cosmonaut Alexandre Grebionkin.

NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which together operate the ISS, have set up an astronaut exchange program, each taking turns transporting a crew member from the other country.

This program was maintained despite the war in Ukraine, and the ISS is now one of the very few subjects of cooperation between Washington and Moscow.

The members of Crew-8 will join the seven people already on the ISS.

After a handover period of a few days with the four members of Crew-7 — an American, a Dane, a Japanese and a Russian — they will return to Earth aboard their own Dragon capsule.

More than 200 scientific experiments must be carried out during the six months spent by Crew-8 in the flying laboratory, which has been permanently inhabited for 23 years.

While the first years of the station’s life were dedicated to its construction, astronauts can now devote more time to science.

But the age of the station also has a downside: NASA and Roscomos are monitoring a “leak” whose flow has recently increased, Joel Montalbano, head of the ISS program at NASA, said this week.

Located at the end of a Russian module, it is where the Russian Progress spaceship docks with the ISS. A hatch is currently permanently closed to isolate the leak from the rest of the station.

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