Four astronauts could blast off to the International Space Station (ISS) next week after setbacks — including a mysterious medical evacuation of the previous crew, last-minute rocket problems and some scheduling conflicts with NASA’s moon mission.
The crew was scheduled to launch on Wednesday next week, but SpaceX said it was grounding all flights on its Falcon 9 rocket while it investigates an unspecified issue. That is just the most recent twist for the SpaceX Crew-12 mission, which includes Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
They will be replacing Crew-11, which returned to Earth last month, one month earlier than planned, during the first medical evacuation in the space station’s history. NASA has declined to disclose any details about the health issue that cut the mission short.
Photo: AFP
However, the laboratory, which orbits 400km above Earth, has since been staffed by a skeleton crew of three. Because of the medical evacuation, NASA moved the date of the Crew-12 launch forward a few days.
The launch had also overlapped with NASA’s first mission to fly astronauts around the moon in more than half a century, but leaks during the final tests this week pushed the date back to March 6.
Once the astronauts finally get on board, they would be one of the last crews to live on board the football field-sized space station. Continuously inhabited for the past quarter century, the aging ISS is scheduled to be pushed into Earth’s orbit before crashing into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean in 2030.
The ISS, once a symbol of warming post-Cold War relations, has been a rare area of continued cooperation between the West and Russia since Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022. However, the space station has not entirely avoided the tensions back on Earth. In November, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev — who had long been planned to be a member of Crew-12 — was suddenly taken off the mission.
Media reports in Russia suggested he had been photographing and sending classified information with his phone.
Russian space agency Roscosmos said he had been transferred to a different job. His replacement, Fedyaev, has already spent some time on the ISS as part of Crew-6 in 2023.
During their eight months on the space station, the four astronauts would conduct many experiments, including research into the effects of microgravity on their bodies. Meir, who previously worked as a marine biologist studying animals in extreme environments, would serve as the crew’s commander. Adenot would become the second French woman to fly to space, following in the footsteps of Claudie Haignere, who spent time on the Mir space station.
They would also test a system that uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality to allow astronauts to carry out their own medical ultrasounds.
The mission is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11am on Wednesday. If called off, launches can also be attempted on the following two days.
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