It was scheduled to lift off at 3:52 a.m. EDT (0752 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a four-member crew aboard its two-stage Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon capsule called Freedom.
With luck, the ESA astronaut from Italy will join the three Americans on a six-month science mission at 250 miles (420 km) above Earth, if everything goes according to plan.
This week’s scheduled launch was given a 90 percent likelihood of success due to projections, NASA officials stated on Tuesday.
One step at a time is the only way to ensure crew safety, NASA associate administrator for space operations Kathryn Lueders told reporters. In the hopes of seeing a “beautiful” step and getting our crew safely into orbit, “We’re hopeful that you’ll get to see.”
The fourth full ISS crew to fly on a SpaceX vehicle since the private rocket firm founded by Musk, also the owner of electric carmaker Tesla Inc. began transporting US space agency astronauts in 2020 would be called Crew 4. The last two years have seen six previous SpaceX human spaceflights.
A board-certified emergency medicine physician and one-time flight surgeon, Dr. Kjell Lindgren, 49, has been assigned as Crew 4’s commanding officer for his second mission to the International Space Station.
The “Veggie” lettuce experiment, which marked the first time a U.S. crew member ate a crop produced in orbit, was one of over 100 science projects he took part in during that mission.
As the mission’s designated pilot, 47-year-old rookie astronaut Bob Hines of the United States Air Force has over 3,500 hours of flight time in 50 different aircraft types and has performed 76 combat missions.
One other first-time spaceflight crew member is geologist Jessica Watkins, 33, who earned her doctorate studying the processes behind big landslides on Mars and Earth before joining NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to work on the Curiosity Mars rover.
This is Watkins’s first opportunity to serve as a long-duration crew member aboard the International Space Station as an African-American woman. Only seven other African-American astronauts have stepped foot on the International Space Station (ISS) since its inception in the early 1990s.
For Crew 4, Samantha Cristoforetti, an ESA astronaut and an Italian Air Force pilot, is making her second space voyage, and she’ll become Europe’s first female space station commander during the six-month mission.
NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) astronauts Cristoforetti and Watkins had previously worked together underwater in the Aquarius habitat.
Seven current ISS inhabitants, including three American astronauts and a German ESA crewmate who will be replaced by Crew 4 in early May, and three Russian cosmonauts, will greet the new crew.
An Axiom Space crew of four men returned to Earth on Monday after completing a two-week mission as the ISS’s first all-private astronaut crew, splashing down in a separate SpaceX vehicle.
A new surge of Astro-tourism flights is partly to blame. When Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson boarded Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc.’s suborbital flights in July, they were joined by their respective billionaires, Jeff and Richard.
Source: The Indian Express
