A crew of two American astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an Emirati astronaut will blast off overnight from Sunday to Monday from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket to reach the International Space Station.
Liftoff is scheduled from the Kennedy Space Center on Monday at 1:45 a.m. local time, 7:45 a.m. in Paris. The weather is forecast to be 95% favourable. The Dragon capsule in which the four passengers are traveling must dock with the space station (ISS) after a journey of approximately one day.
Political tensions “rarely addressed”
Sultan al-Neyadi, 41, will become the fourth astronaut from an Arab country in history, the second Emirati, but the first from his country to spend six months in space.
“We are physically, mentally and technically prepared,” he told reporters when he arrived at the space center on Tuesday. “It is a great honor to be here, and even a privilege,” she added.
The mission also includes a Russian astronaut, Andrei Fediayev, just as tensions between Washington and Moscow are at an all-time high, a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was already planned before the Moscow offensive that the Russians would travel with SpaceX and the Americans with Russian Soyuz spacecraft, an exchange program that was maintained despite extreme diplomatic tensions. The space station is one of the few fields of cooperation still ongoing between the two countries.
Asked about the impact of these political tensions on the crew, the mission commander, the American Stephen Bowen, replied Tuesday that it was “rare for these issues to be raised in everyday conversations”, and that he and his colleagues remained “focused on the mission.”
Four astronauts will go down to Earth
The crew, dubbed “Crew-6,” is the sixth to travel to the ISS on a regular rotation mission provided by SpaceX. The capsule that carried them, called Endeavour, has already flown through space three times.
NASA contracts the services of the American company to send its astronauts approximately every six months to the flying laboratory. There they carry out scientific experiments and ensure the maintenance of the station, which has been permanently inhabited for more than 22 years.
Crew-6 will replace the four members of Crew-5 (two Americans, one Russian and one Japanese), who arrived in October 2022 and who will return to Earth aboard their own SpaceX ship, after a few days of handover.
Also aboard the ISS are three other passengers (two Russians and one American), who arrived aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The latter suffered a leak last December, making it dangerous for the three passengers to return to Earth on board. Therefore, the Russian space agency Roscomos sent a rescue ship, which docked safely to the ISS on Saturday.
Source: BFM TV
