Four astronauts launch to space station after prior crew’s early departure
Four new crew members are on their way to the International Space Station after being launched into orbit early Friday morning.
They will arrive at a laboratory in unusually quiet orbit.
NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev were initially going to overlap in space with the outgoing crew, a mission known as Crew-11. But this group had to return to Earth early due to a medical problem. (NASA has not released the identity of the affected astronaut or the nature of the incident for privacy reasons.)
The Crew-11 astronauts departed on January 14, leaving only one NASA astronaut, Chris Williams, aboard the International Space Station, along with two Russian cosmonauts.
The four new arrivals, known as Crew-12, will bring the space station to its standard occupancy of seven people. Their SpaceX capsule should dock Saturday around 3:15 p.m. ET.
The crew took off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 5:15 a.m. ET from the Cape Canaveral space station in Florida.
High winds earlier this week along the flight path forced NASA to push back the launch by two days. The agency regularly monitors weather conditions along the rocket’s trajectory, in case an emergency during ascent requires the Dragon capsule carrying the astronauts to separate from the rocket and land along the East Coast.
A recent Falcon 9 accident, during an uncrewed SpaceX mission to deploy a batch of the company’s Starlink satellites, also led NASA officials to review the company’s findings before launching the launch.
The Feb. 2 incident prompted SpaceX to briefly suspend launches while it and the Federal Aviation Administration investigated the problem. Several days later, the FAA cleared SpaceX to resume operations, and a subsequent launch successfully deployed the Starlink satellites, with the rocket performing as designed.
Since the space station has been understaffed, no major problems have arisen, NASA officials said at a press briefing earlier this week. There was therefore no urgency to rush the arrival of the new crew.
“We’re looking forward to an additional helping hand, but we’ll launch when we’re ready,” Dina Contella, deputy program director for NASA’s International Space Station at Johnson Space Center, said Monday.
The Crew-12 mission is Meir and Fedyaev’s second spaceflight, and Hathaway and Adenot’s first. Meir previously spent 205 days on the space station, starting in July 2019. During that time, she and fellow NASA astronaut Christina Koch made history by performing the agency’s first all-female spacewalks. Koch is one of the crew members of NASA’s Artemis II mission, which is expected to send four astronauts on a flight around the Moon. They could be launched as early as March 6.
The space station’s four new crew members are expected to stay on the orbiting outpost for about eight months. During this time, they will conduct scientific experiments, including research on food production in space, how microgravity affects blood flow in the body, medical investigations into the bacteria that cause pneumonia, and other studies that NASA says will “advance research and technology for future missions to the Moon and Mars and benefit humanity on Earth.”
