SpaceX's Crew-6 is expected to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) early Friday morning. You can watch the meetup live.
SpaceX's Crew-6 Mission Will Dock With ISS Friday
Crew-6's Dragon capsule, Endeavour, blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:34 a.m. EST Thursday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. If things go as planned, Endeavour will be in ISS at 1:17 a.m. EST Friday, Space.com reported.
Coverage will begin at 11:30 p.m. EST Thursday and continue for a while showing the opening of the hatches between the ISS and Endeavour around 2:55 a.m. EST. There will also be a welcome ceremony for the Crew-6 astronauts at 3:40 a.m. EST or so.
Onboard Endeavour is a crew of four NASA astronauts, Woody Hoburg and Stephen Bowen, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Sultan Al Neyadi, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. They will be staying in the orbiting lab for their six-month mission.
All of the astronauts were rookies except for Bowen, the Crew-6 commander. Al Neyadi is the first from UAE to spend a long-duration stint aboard ISS.
The Crew-6 mission overlaps SpaceX's other mission, Crew-5. The Crew-5 quartet includes NASA's Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Koichi Wakata of Japan, and cosmonaut Anna Kikina. The Crew-5 mission is set to return to Earth five days after Crew-6's arrival.
Aside from the Crew-5 astronauts, also orbiting at the ISS are NASA's Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin. They have been on the orbiting lab since September aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
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However, a coolant leak occurred in mid-December, leaving the spacecraft unfit to carry the cosmonauts back home. Russia's space agency launched an uncrewed replacement last month to take the trio home.
However, the three cosmonauts will have to stay for six more months on ISS as the crewed Soyuz MS-24 will likely be launched in September. Thus, doubling their time in space to about a year.
All About SpaceX Crew-6's Launch
SpaceX's Crew-6's successful launch Thursday came after a 72-hour delay. The Crew-6 mission was set to launch Monday but was scrubbed in the final minutes due to a blockage in the flow of engine-ignition fluid. NASA said the issue was fixed by replacing a clogged filter and purging the system, Reuters reported.
Nine minutes after Thursday's launch, the rocket's upper stage delivered the Crew Dragon into a preliminary orbit. Meanwhile, the reusable lower-stage Falcon booster returned to Earth and landed safely on the recovery vessel "Just Read the Instructions" floating in the Atlantic.
Crew-6 mission marks the seventh astronaut flight SpaceX has carried on behalf of NASA since 2020. They will oversee over 200 science and tech projects, including researching how some substances burn in a microgravity environment and investigating microbial samples that will be connected from the exterior of the space station, CNN reported.
Russian cosmonaut Fedyaev joined the Crew-6 team as part of the ride-sharing agreement in 2022 between NASA and Roscosmos. It proves that despite the geopolitical tensions spurred by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia and the United States have remained primary partners on the space station.
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