Three American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut are scheduled to launch to the International Space Station overnight from Saturday to Sunday as part of the usual crew rotation aboard the flying laboratory.
Posted at 12:41 p.m.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 11:16 p.m.
However, there could be a postponement as the weather is expected to be only 40% favorable for the launch.
The Dragon capsule, which is intended to transport the crew at the top of the rocket, has already been used on four manned missions.
This time the four passengers are members of Crew-8, the eighth regular rotation mission that SpaceX is conducting for NASA.
“To the untrained eye, it seems almost routine that SpaceX sends them there one by one,” NASA chief Bill Nelson admitted at a press conference this week.
American Michael Barratt is the only Crew 8 astronaut to have visited the International Space Station (ISS).
However, it will be the first space flight for the other two Americans, Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps, as well as the Russian cosmonaut Alexandre Grebionkin.
NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which jointly operate the ISS, have launched an astronaut exchange program in which each takes turns bringing 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 cooperation partners between Washington and Moscow.
The Crew-8 members 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 return to Earth aboard their own Dragon capsule.
More than 200 scientific experiments must be carried out during the six months that Crew-8 spends in the flying laboratory, which has been permanently inhabited for 23 years.
While the first years of the station's life were devoted to construction, astronauts can now devote more time to science.
But the station's age also has a downside: NASA and Roscomos are monitoring a “leak” whose flow has increased recently, Joel Montalbano, head of the ISS program at NASA, said this week.
Located at the end of a Russian module, the Russian Progress spacecraft docks with the ISS. A hatch is currently permanently closed to isolate the leak from the rest of the station.