NASA on Tuesday announced the postponement by 24 hours of the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket from Space X, originally scheduled for Sunday. The rocket is to send three astronauts and a cosmonaut to the International Space Station (ISS).
Americans Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russian Andrey Fedyaev and Emirati Sultan al-Neyadi, who were scheduled to take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday at 2:07 a.m., will have to wait until Monday, according to NASA officials. The astronauts and the cosmonaut must spend six months on board the ISS. They arrived in Florida on Tuesday to begin their final preparations for the mission.
‘When you look at the work that we still have to do, mainly on the vehicle: to ensure that [la capsule] Dragon and [la fusée] Falcon 9 are ready to go, we are a little late,” said Steve Stich, NASA manned commercial program manager. ‘And so we need a bit more time’.
According to this official, several questions must be settled before the launch, including additional analyzes of the thermal performance of certain outer skin cells at the Dragon capsule.
NASA says it expects members of the SpaceX Dragon Crew-6 mission to complete a five-day handover with the four members of Dragon Crew-5, who have been aboard the ISS since October.
At the same time, the Russian space agency indicated on Tuesday that the return of an astronaut and two cosmonauts stranded on the ISS, due to a leak, was not finally planned until September, a year after their flight in space.
In December, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft, docked to the ISS and which was to bring back to earth the American Frank Rubio and the Russians Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitri Peteline, suffered a spectacular leak, due according to Moscow to the impact of a micrometeorite. The Russian agency has decided to send to their rescue another spacecraft, the Soyuz MS-23, which is due to leave on February 24 from the Baikonur cosmodrome.
/ATS