On Thursday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched carrying two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut, and the second Emirati to voyage to space.
The SpaceX Dragon Crew-6 mission blasted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:34 am (0534 GMT) after being scrubbed on Monday due to a clog in a filter that supplies ignition fluid to start the rocket engines.
The Dragon crew capsule, known as Endeavour, is expected to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) at 1:17 am (0617 GMT) on Friday, following a 24-hour voyage.
The crew members will include NASA’s Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russia’s Andrey Fedyaev, and Sultan al-Neyadi of the United Arab Emirates, who will spend six months on the orbiting station.
Neyadi, 41, is the second astronaut from the oil-rich UAE to journey to space, following his compatriot Hazzaa al-Mansoori’s eight-day mission in 2019. Fedyaev, the Russian mission specialist, will be the second Russian cosmonaut to fly to the ISS aboard a SpaceX rocket. NASA astronauts fly regularly to the station on Russian Soyuz craft.
While aboard the ISS, the Crew-6 members will conduct dozens of experiments, including studying how materials burn in microgravity and researching heart, brain, and cartilage functions.
The current crew is the sixth to be transported by a SpaceX rocket to the ISS. The Endeavour capsule has flown into space three times previously.
NASA pays SpaceX to ferry astronauts to the ISS roughly every six months. The agency expects Crew-6 to have a handover of several days with the four members of Crew-5 who have been on the ISS since October, with Crew-5 returning to Earth after the handover.
The construction of the ISS began in 1998, a time of increased US-Russia cooperation following the Cold War space race. Although the relationship between Moscow and Washington has been tense, space has remained a rare venue of cooperation. Bowen, a veteran of three space shuttle missions, said politics rarely come up while in space.
Russia has been using the aging but reliable Soyuz capsules to ferry astronauts into space since the 1960s. However, in recent years, Russia’s space program has been plagued by a litany of problems that have led to the loss of satellites and vehicles.
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