Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company was ready to try again to send NASA’s next long-term crew to the International Space Station on Thursday, about 72 hours after an initial attempt was scrapped due to a clogged filter in the launch system.
Two NASA astronauts will be joined by a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates for a six-month science mission involving experiments ranging from human cell growth in space to controlling combustible materials in microgravity.
The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying an autonomously piloted Crew Dragon capsule named Endeavor, was scheduled to lift off at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The crew of four should reach the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits about 250 miles (420 km) above Earth, about 25 hours after liftoff early Friday morning.
Monday’s first attempt to send the crew to space was aborted less than three minutes before launch when launch crews discovered a problem with the flow of ignition fluid used to launch the rocket’s main thrusters. NASA said replacing a clogged filter and flushing the system fixed the problem.
NASA said Wednesday the mission was “ready” for launch with a 95% chance of favorable weather conditions.
“All systems look good for launch, although teams were monitoring the weather along the spaceship’s ascent path,” SpaceX said on Twitter.
The mission, designated Crew 6, marks the sixth long-term ISS team NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the privately-owned rocket venture founded by Musk — billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc and social media platform Twitter — in May. 2020 started with sending US astronauts to orbit.
The newest ISS crew is led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a former U.S. Navy submariner who spent more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three space shuttle flights and seven spacewalks.
Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and airline transport pilot assigned to pilot Crew 6, will make his first spaceflight.
Crew 6 is also notable for the participation of UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from US soil as part of a long-duration space station team.
Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 is Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 42, who, like Alneyadi, is an engineer and aerospace novice and has been designated mission specialist for the team.
Fedyaev is the last cosmonaut to fly aboard a US spacecraft under a ride-sharing deal signed in July by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.
The Crew 6 team is welcomed aboard the space station by seven current ISS residents – three American NASA crew members, including Commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly to space, along with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut .
About the length of a football field and the largest man-made object in space, the ISS has been operated continuously for more than two decades by a US-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
The outpost was conceived in part as a venture to improve relations between Washington and Moscow following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War rivalry that gave rise to the original American-American in the 1950s and 1960s. Soviet space race.