Washington: After a series of delays, SpaceX will launch four astronauts to the International Space Station on Wednesday night on the “Crew-3” mission.
Outpost Orbitals currently operate with only one NASA astronaut in the US segment to welcome the entry crew, after the astronauts of the previous Crew-2 mission in Canripak in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday night.
King Chari-3 Crew-3, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn United States and Matthias Maurer from Germany will now be launched on the Crew Dragon ship installed on Rocket Falcon 9 at 9:03 pm local time (0203 GMT Thursday) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The spacecraft, called durability, will be anchored with an ISS at 19:10 Thursday (0010 GMT Friday), with streaming provided by NASA.
This flight was originally set for Halloween but was delayed first because of the weather, then “minor medical problems” which affected one of the crews.
NASA did not say who it was but said it was not related to Covid.
Chari, the US Air Force Colonel, ordered a mission and made his first trip into space, along with Barron and Maurer.
Marshburn, a doctor, flew up a shuttle in 2009 and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in a mission began 2012-13.
Barron, who along with Chari was chosen for the Astronaut NASA corps in 2017, the latest recruitment, previously served as a submarine war officer for the Navy, while Maurer, a material science engineer, would be the 12th German in Kosmos.
Crew-3 is part of the multibilion-dollar NASA partnership with SPACEX signed after ending the space shuttle program in 2011 and aims to restore US capacity to do human spaces.
The quartet will spend six months on outpost orbitals and conduct research to help inform spacecraft exploration in the future and benefit the life on earth.
The scientific spotlight of this mission includes experiments to grow plants in space without land or other growth media, and others to build optical fibers in micro, which have been suggested by previous studies will be superior to the earth.
The 3rd Astronaut will also carry out spacecraft to complete the upgrade of solar panels of the station and will be present for two tourism missions, including Japanese visitors on the Soyuz Russian spacecraft at the end of the year and the Axiom Space-X crew, set to be launched on February 2022.