Three American astronauts and a Russian astronaut are scheduled to launch from Saturday to Sunday night to the International Space Station, as part of the usual crew rotation aboard the flight laboratory.
The missile takes off Falcon 9 The SpaceX rocket is scheduled to launch at 11:16 p.m. from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
However, it is possible that it will be postponed due to the weather, which is only estimated at 40% for the launch.
Capsule the Dragon Which should transport the crew, is located at the top of the rocket, and has already been used on four previous crewed missions.
The four passengers this time are members of Crew-8, SpaceX's eighth regular rotation mission for NASA.
“It seems almost routine to the untrained eye that SpaceX is sending them there one by one,” NASA chief Bill Nelson admitted at a news conference this week.
American Michael Barratt is the only Crew-8 astronaut to have actually visited the International Space Station (ISS).
However, this will be the first spaceflight for two other Americans – Matthew Dominick and Janet Epps – as well as Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebyunkin.
NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which together manage the International Space Station, have established an astronaut exchange program, in which each takes turns bringing a crew member from the other country.
This program has been maintained despite the war in Ukraine, and the ISS is now one of the very few subjects of cooperation between Washington and Moscow.
Members of Crew-8 will join the seven people already on the International Space Station.
After a delivery period of a few days with the four members of Crew-7 – an American, a Dane, a Japanese and a Russian – they will return to Earth aboard their Dragon capsule.
More than 200 scientific experiments must be carried out during the six months that Crew 8 spends in the flying laboratory where it has been permanently inhabited for 23 years.
While the first years of the station's life were dedicated to its construction, astronauts can now devote more time to science.
But the station's age also has a downside: NASA and Roscomus are monitoring a “leak” whose flow has increased recently, Joel Montalbano, head of NASA's International Space Station program, said this week.
It is located at the end of a Russian module, and is where the Russian spacecraft Progress docks with the International Space Station. The hatch is currently permanently sealed to isolate the leak from the rest of the station.
