SpaceX and NASA targeting Feb. 26 for Crew-6 astronaut start
SpaceX’s following astronaut mission will launch late following thirty day period, if all goes according to prepare.
SpaceX and NASA have circled Feb. 26 (opens in new tab) for the launch of Crew-6, which will mail four spaceflyers to the Global Place Station (ISS) for a roughly six-thirty day period remain. That date is a slight push from the previously focus on of mid-February.
Crew-6 will mail the SpaceX Dragon capsule Endeavour aloft atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which will start from NASA’s Kennedy House Center in Florida.
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The mission is so named mainly because it will be the six contracted astronaut flight that SpaceX flies to the ISS for NASA. But Crew-6 will truly be the ninth crewed orbital mission for Elon Musk’s enterprise total.
In addition to the Crew-1 through Crew-5 missions, SpaceX also flew the Demo-2 test flight and personal Ax-1 mission to the orbital lab in 2020 and 2022, respectively, and the private Inspiration4 mission to Earth orbit in September 2021.
The Crew-6 mission is highly international. Its crewmembers are NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Sultan Al Neyadi and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Bowen and Hoburg have been on the Crew-6 manifest since December 2021. Fedyaev came aboard in July 2022 as aspect of a crew swap settlement between NASA and Russia’s federal area company, Roscosmos. That identical month, Al Neyadi became the mission’s fourth and remaining crewmate.
Al Neyadi’s seat on Crew-6 came via a 2021 deal involving NASA and Axiom Area, the Houston-dependent enterprise that structured and operated the Ax-1 mission.
“To guarantee constant U.S. presence aboard the International Space Station, NASA signed a agreement in 2021 with Axiom Place to fly a NASA astronaut on a Soyuz rotation in exchange for a seat on a future U.S. industrial spacecraft,” NASA officers wrote in a website publish final July (opens in new tab). (Soyuz is Russia’s workhorse crewed spacecraft, which has been flying astronauts to orbit for a long time.)
“Axiom introduced an agreement on April 29, 2022, with the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Middle of the UAE to fly its crew member in the seat,” company officers included.
Crew-6 will briefly overlap with SpaceX’s Crew-5, which launched to the ISS this earlier October. The 4 astronauts of Crew-5 will return to Earth shortly just after Crew-6’s arrival at the station, NASA officers said a short while ago.
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