The rocket will carry an international crew. (File)
Washington:
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will depart early Monday for the International Space Station carrying two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and the second Emirati to travel to space.
The SpaceX Dragon Crew-6 mission will depart from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 01:45 AM (0645 GMT). Weather conditions are expected to be near perfect.
The Crew Dragon capsule, named Endeavor, will dock with the ISS at 02:38 am (0738 GMT) on Tuesday if all goes according to plan.
NASA’s Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russian Andrey Fedyaev and Sultan al-Neyadi of the United Arab Emirates will spend six months on the orbiting space station.
Neyadi, 41, becomes the fourth astronaut from an Arab country and the second from the oil-rich United Arab Emirates to travel to space; his compatriot Hazzaa al-Mansoori flew an eight-day mission in 2019.
Neyadi described the upcoming mission as a “great honour”.
Hoburg, the Endeavor pilot, and Fedyaev, the Russian mission specialist, will also make their first spaceflights.
Fedyaev is the second Russian cosmonaut to fly to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket. NASA astronauts regularly fly to the station on Russian Soyuz capsules.
Space has remained a rare meeting point of cooperation between Moscow and Washington since the Russian offensive in Ukraine brought the two capitals into sharp opposition.
Such exchanges have continued despite those tensions.
Bowen, a veteran of three space shuttle missions, said politics are rarely discussed in space.
“We are all professionals. We stay focused on the mission itself,” said the mission commander. “It’s always been a great relationship that we’ve had with cosmonauts once we’re in space.”
Aboard the ISS, Crew-6 members will conduct dozens of experiments, including studying how materials burn in microgravity and examining heart, brain and cartilage functions.
The current crew is the sixth to be transported to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket. The Endeavor capsule has flown into space three times.
NASA pays the private company SpaceX to bring astronauts to the flying lab about every six months.
The space agency expects Crew-6 to have a handover for several days with the four members of the SpaceX Dragon Crew-5, who have been stationed on the ISS since October. Crew-5 then returns to Earth.
Rescue pod
Also on board the ISS are Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio.
They were due to return home on March 28, but their Soyuz MS-22 capsule’s cooling system was damaged by a small meteoroid in mid-December while docked at the ISS.
An unmanned Russian Soyuz capsule, MS-23, lifted off from Kazakhstan on Friday to carry the three astronauts home. They are now scheduled to return to Earth in September.
The ISS was launched in 1998 at a time of increased cooperation between the US and Russia following the Cold War space race.
Russia has been using the outdated but reliable Soyuz capsules to launch astronauts into space since the 1960s.
But in recent years, the Russian space program has been plagued by a laundry list of problems that have led to the loss of satellites and vehicles.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NewsMadura staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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