NASA will send a new crew to the ISS

On Monday, Elon Musk’s SpaceX company plans to launch another long-duration crew into orbit on the International Space Station (ISS): two NASA crew members will be joined in flight by an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates and a Russian cosmonaut.

SpaceX’s launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, is scheduled to lift off at 1:45 a.m. from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The four-person crew is due to reach the ISS in about 25 hours on Tuesday morning to begin a six-month mission in microgravity aboard an orbiting laboratory about 420 km above Earth.

Dubbed Crew 6, the mission will be NASA’s sixth long-duration crewed stay on the ISS since SpaceX began sending American astronauts into orbit in May 2020.

This ISS crew is commanded by Stephen Bowen, 59, a former US Navy submarine officer who spent more than 40 days in orbit, performing three shuttle flights and seven spacewalks.

Crew 6 will be welcomed aboard the space station by the current seven inhabitants of the ISS – three NASA crew members from the United States, including Commander Nicole Aunapa Mann, the first Native American woman to fly in the space station. space, as well as three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.

The ISS, the largest man-made object in space, has been in continuous operation since November 2000 under the control of a US-Russian consortium that also includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.