FLORIDA: Elon Musk's rocket entity SpaceX was set to launch early on Monday the International Space Station's next long-duration team into orbit. Two NASA crew members would be joined by an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates and a Russian cosmonaut.
Around 1:45 a.m. EST, the SpaceX launch vehicle, which consists of a Falcon 9 rocket atop an autonomous Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Endeavour, was scheduled to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The four-person crew will launch a six-month mission in microgravity from the International Space Station (ISS) around 250 miles (420 km) above Earth. They should arrive at the orbiting laboratory Tuesday morning, some 25 hours later. Since May 2020, when American astronauts have been launched into space by SpaceX, the commercial rocket company founded by Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla and social media site Twitter, Crew 6 represents the sixth long-term ISS team NASA has flown aboard SpaceX.
The mission's launch readiness assessment was finished on Saturday, according to NASA, and the flight was granted the all-clear to proceed with its scheduled takeoff. On Sunday, Musk tweeted on Sunday: "All systems and weather are looking good for launch."
Mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a former submarine officer in the U.S. Navy who has participated in three space shuttle trips and seven spacewalks, is in charge of the newest ISS crew. He has spent more than 40 days in orbit. Warren "Woody" Hoburg, a 37-year-old commercial pilot and fellow NASA astronaut, will fly in space for the first time as Crew 6. The UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, who is only the second person from his nation to travel to space and the first to launch from American territory as a member of a long-duration space station team, is also a remarkable addition to the Crew 6 mission. In 2019 a Russian spacecraft carried the first astronaut from the United Arab Emirates into orbit. Andrei Fedyaev, a 41-year-old Russian cosmonaut who, like Alneyadi, is an engineer and a spaceflight novice, completes the crew of four as a mission specialist.
Notwithstanding heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Fedyaev is the most recent cosmonaut to fly aboard an American spacecraft as part of a ride-sharing agreement agreed in July by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
Seven existing ISS inhabitants, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to travel to space, three Russians, and a Japanese astronaut, will greet the Crew 6 team when they arrive on the space station. U.S.-Russian cooperation, which is also made up of 11 European nations, Canada, and Japan, has been in charge of running the International Space Station (ISS), which is the largest artificial object in space and measures about the length of a football field.
After the Soviet Union's fall and the conclusion of Cold War hostilities that gave rise to the first U.S.-Soviet space race in the 1950s and 1960s, the outpost was partly designed as a project to repair relations between Washington and Moscow.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine a year ago, NASA-Roscosmos cooperation has been put to the test like never before, prompting the United States to impose broad sanctions against Moscow while gradually boosting military assistance to the Ukrainian government.
The Crew 6 mission also comes after two recent incidents involving Russian spacecraft attached to the orbiting laboratory that allegedly resulted from coolant leaks causing micrometeoroids, or tiny space rocks, to rush through space and strike the vessel at a high speed.
A Soyuz crew capsule that had sent two cosmonauts and an astronaut to the space station in September for a six-month mission that is now scheduled to finish in March was one of the Russian vehicles that was impacted. To transport them down to Earth, an empty replacement Soyuz launched on Friday and docked with the space station on Saturday.
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