NASA on Tuesday announced the postponement by 24 hours of Space X’s launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, originally scheduled for Sunday, which must send three astronauts and one cosmonaut to the International Space Station (ISS).
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Americans Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russian Andrey Fedyaev and Emirati Sultan al-Neyadi were scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 2:07 a.m. (7:07 GMT) on Sunday, but have to wait 1: NASA officials say on Monday at 45:00 (6:45 GMT).
The astronauts and the cosmonaut must spend six months in orbit on board the ISS. They arrived in Florida Tuesday to begin final preparations for the mission.
“If you look at the work we still have to do, mostly on the vehicle: getting (the capsule) Dragon and (the rocket) Falcon 9 ready for launch… we’re a little behind,” said Steve Stich, manned commercial lead program of NASA.
“And that’s why we need a little more time,” he told reporters after a Falcon 9 and Dragon readiness test.
According to Steve Stich, several issues need to be addressed before launch, including further analysis of the thermal performance of certain outer skin cells on the Dragon capsule.
Nasa officials said they expect members of the SpaceX Dragon Crew-6 mission to complete a five-day handoff with the four members of Dragon Crew-5 who have been aboard the ISS since October.
At the same time, the Russian space agency said on Tuesday that the return of an astronaut and two cosmonauts stranded because of a leak on the International Space Station (ISS) was not finally scheduled until September, a year after their flight into space.
In December, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, docked with the ISS and designed to bring American Frank Rubio and Russians Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitri Peteline back to Earth, suffered a spectacular leak, which Moscow says was due to the impact of a micrometeorite.
The Russian agency has decided to send another spacecraft to their rescue, the Soyuz MS-23, which is scheduled to depart from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on February 24.
Before this escape, the three men were supposed to reach Earth on March 28th. “Now it’s scheduled to take place in September 2023 aboard the Soyuz MS-23,” Roscosmos said in a statement Tuesday.