Three American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut are scheduled to launch from Florida on Sunday evening to the International Space Station (ISS), where they will stay for about six months.
Posted at 3:47 p.m.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying it is scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center on Sunday at 10:53 p.m.
The start, originally planned for Saturday, was postponed by 24 hours due to unfavorable weather. If a further postponement is necessary on Sunday, another filming opportunity is planned for Monday evening.
The capsule called “Endeavor,” which is intended to transport the crew and is placed at the top of the rocket, has already been used on four previous missions by Elon Musk.
This time the four passengers are members of Crew-8, the eighth regular rotational mission of the American crew on the ISS, which SpaceX carried out for NASA.
The American Michael Barratt is the only Crew 8 astronaut who has already visited the flying laboratory.
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.
“Many of the things we dreamed of long ago are coming true today,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said this week, citing stem cell research as an example.
But the station's age also has a downside: NASA and Roscomos are monitoring a “leak” located at the end of a Russian module whose flow has increased recently, Joel Montalbano, head of the station's ISS program, said this week at NASA.
A hatch is currently permanently closed to isolate the leak from the rest of the station.