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Joe Skipper and Steve Gorman
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CAPE CANAVER – Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company was to launch the next long-range crew of astronauts to NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) early Wednesday, including a space traveler and a Martian landslide geologist.
The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket covered with a Crew Dragon capsule called Freedom, was set to take off with its four-member crew at 3:52 a.m. EDT (07:52 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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If all goes according to plan, the three American astronauts and their collaborator from the European Space Agency (ESA) crew from Italy will reach the space station about 17 hours later to begin a six-month scientific mission in orbit about 250 miles (420 km) ) above the Earth.
During a pre-launch briefing on Tuesday, NASA officials said the forecast provided a 90% chance of favorable weather conditions for take-off on time.
“Flying safely with a crew means you have to do it step by step,” Catherine Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told reporters. “We hope you will see a really, really beautiful step and send our crew safely into orbit.”
The latest mission, dubbed Crew 4, will mark the fourth full-fledged ISS crew NASA has sent into orbit aboard the SpaceX vehicle since a private rocket company founded by Musk, also owner of electric car maker Tesla Inc, began flying. astronauts of the US space agency in 2020. In total, SpaceX has launched six previous human spaceflights in the last two years.
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Dr. Kel Lindgren, a 49-year-old certified emergency physician and one-time flight surgeon who has made his second trip to the ISS, where he entered orbit 141 days in 2015, has been appointed Commander of Crew 4.
During this expedition, he made two space trips and participated in more than 100 scientific projects, including the experiment with lettuce “Veggie”, which marked the first time a member of the American crew ate a crop grown in orbit.
The designated pilot for the mission is rookie astronaut Bob Hines, 47, a U.S. Air Force fighter, test pilot and aviation instructor who has accumulated more than 3,500 hours of flight time in 50 aircraft types and completed 76 combat missions.
Another crew member who is making his debut space flight as a mission specialist is Jessica Watkins, 33, a geologist who received her doctorate from studying the processes behind large landslides on Mars and Earth and joined the Curiosity rover’s research team. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. .
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The flight of Crew 4 will make Watkins the first African-American to join a long-term mission aboard the International Space Station. It follows in the footsteps of only seven other black astronauts who have climbed the ISS since its inception more than two decades ago.
Crew 4 is completed by Samantha Cristoforetti, 45, an ESA astronaut and pilot of the Italian Air Force jet, who is making her second flight to the space station and will take command of ISS operations during the team’s six-month stay. the first woman in Europe to play this role.
Christophoretti and Watkins previously served together as aquanauts in the underwater habitat of Aquarius at NASA’s 2019 Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO).
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The Crew 4 team will be greeted aboard seven existing ISS occupants, four Crew 3 members who will replace – three American astronauts and one German teammate from the ESA crew, who are due to complete their mission in early May – and three Russian astronauts.
The launch comes less than two days after a separate team of four, organized by Houston-based Axiom Space, returned from a two-week mission as the first fully private ISS astronaut crew to explode into a different SpaceX capsule on Monday. .
He is also following a wave of recent astro-tourist flights. Last July, two commercial space operators, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic Holding Inc, launched successive suborbital flights with their respective co-founders, billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, traveling together. (Report by Joe Skipper in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Writing and additional reports by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Sandra Mahler)
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