2023-08-25 20:22:00
Called Crew-7, the mission is commanded by the American Jasmin Moghbeli and includes the Dane Andreas Mogensen, the Japanese Satoshi Furukawa and the Russian Konstantin Borissov.
NASA and SpaceX will try again this Saturday to send a crew of astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), after a first attempt canceled the day before. Launch is scheduled for 3:27 a.m. (9:27 a.m. Paris time) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If anything goes wrong, a fallback window is scheduled for Sunday.
The takeoff was originally scheduled to take place on Friday, but was postponed to examine a component of the Dragon capsule, in which the four passengers will travel and which must dock with the ISS.
An “adventure” after a “very intense training”
This will be Konstantin Borissov and Jasmin Moghbeli’s first space trip. “What I’m most looking forward to is looking at our planet from above,” the Iranian-born MIT graduate said at a press conference last month. “Everyone I spoke to who had ever flown said it was a life-changing view.”
Konstantin Borissov told him he was looking forward to “this adventure” after “very intense training”.
This is the seventh regular crew rotation mission operated by SpaceX, the company of billionaire Elon Musk, for NASA.
NASA has also signed a contract with Boeing for the development of a second American means of transport to the ISS. But Boeing’s program has suffered countless delays, and the first manned test flight is now not scheduled until after March 2024.
A six-month mission
Konstantin Borissov will be the third Russian to travel aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, powered by a Falcon 9 rocket.
Despite diplomatic tensions at their height between Washington and Moscow since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the collaboration between the American and Russian space agencies continues in the ISS, one of the rare subjects of cooperation still in progress between the two country.
After a trip of about a day, the crew will arrive at the International Space Station. He will stay for about six months aboard this flying laboratory, where he will carry out multiple scientific experiments.
The Crew-7 crew will join the seven passengers currently aboard the ISS, which has been permanently manned for more than 20 years. After a few days with the Crew-6 crew (two Americans, a Russian and an Emirati), they will come back down to Earth aboard another SpaceX capsule.
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