Two American astronauts, an Emirati and a Russian cosmonaut were heading this Thursday, aboard a SpaceX capsule, to the International Space Station, where they will arrive after a journey of about 24 hours and will remain for about six months.
The SpaceX rocket lifted off Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:34 a.m. local time.
The Dragon capsule carrying the four passengers will dock with the space station (ISS) on Friday at 1:17 am Eastern Time.
The crew, dubbed Crew-6, is made up of NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi, and Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fediaev.
Sultan al-Neyadi, 41, becomes the fourth astronaut from an Arab country in history, the second Emirati, and will be the first from his country to spend six months in space.
American-Russian collaboration
Furthermore, while tensions between Washington and Moscow are at their highest point a year after the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, the two countries have maintained an exchange program that allows Russians to travel with SpaceX and Americans on board Russian Soyuz rockets. The space station is one of the few fields of cooperation still ongoing between the two countries.
“Crew 6 will be busy aboard the International Space Station, conducting 200 experiments that will help us prepare for missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond,” Crew 6 CEO Bill Nelson of The NASA.
On Monday, the takeoff had been canceled at the last minute due to a technical problem. NASA explained on Wednesday that the problem concerned the routing of a fluid used to ignite the engines, caused by a “clogged filter.” The latter had been replaced before takeoff on Thursday.
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.
Three other passengers (two Russians and one American) are also on board the space station, they arrived with a Soyuz spacecraft. Therefore, the ISS will host no less than 11 people for a few days.
Source: BFM TV
