The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the companys Crew Dragon spacecraft vents fuel prior to a scrubbed launch from pad 39A for the Crew-6 mission at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on February 27, 2023.
Chandan Khanna | Afp | Getty Images
NASA and SpaceX early on Monday postponed the launch of a capsule containing two U.S. astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a United Arab Emirates crewmate minutes before scheduled lift-off from Florida on a flight to the International Space Station.
The U.S. space agency and SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, cited a technical glitch regarding the ignition fluid used to begin the spacecraft’s engines.
The countdown had appeared to be progressing easily until about two and a half minutes before blastoff, when NASA announced on its live webcast that the launch of the 4 crew members on a six-month science mission could be postponed.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Crew Dragon capsule had been scheduled for liftoff at 1:45 a.m. EST (0645 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The primary backup launch opportunity for the mission was set for early Tuesday, about 24 hours from the initial try to get the rocket off the bottom.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX immediately said how long it’d actually take before they might be able to try again. Eleventh-hour launch scrubs are fairly routine within the highly complex and dangerous endeavor of human spaceflight.
Had Monday’s launch been a hit, it was expected to take the crew about 25 hours to achieve their destination on the International Space Station, a laboratory orbiting about 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.
Designated Crew 6, the mission will carry the sixth long-duration ISS team that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since Musk’s California-based company began sending American astronauts to orbit in May 2020.
The newest ISS crew is led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a one-time U.S. Navy submarine officer who has logged greater than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three space shuttle flights and 7 spacewalks.
Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and industrial aviator designated because the Crew 6 pilot, will probably be making his first spaceflight.
The Crew 6 mission is also notable for its inclusion of UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly to space and the primary to launch from U.S. soil as a part of a long-duration space station team. UAE’s first-ever astronaut launched to orbit in 2019 aboard a Russian spacecraft.
Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 is Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 41, who like Alneyadi is an engineer and spaceflight rookie designated as a mission specialist for the team.
Fedyaev is the newest cosmonaut to fly aboard an American 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 invasion of Ukraine.
The Crew 6 team will probably be welcomed aboard the space station by seven current ISS occupants – three U.S. NASA crew members, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the primary Native American woman to fly to space, together with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.
The ISS, concerning the length of a football field and the most important human-made object in space, has been constantly operated by a U.S.-Russian-led consortium that features Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
