NASA wants to keep the ISS going with the help of its current partners until about 2030.
CAPE CANAVERAL (Reuters) – The next long-term crew of the International Space Station was supposed to be sent into orbit on Wednesday by Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX. A Russian cosmonaut, two American astronauts, and a Japanese astronaut were all going to be part of the mission.
The SpaceX launch vehicle, which was made up of a Falcon 9 rocket and an Endurance-named Crew Dragon capsule, was set to take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at noon EDT (1600 GMT).
The four-person crew should arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) about 29 hours later, on Thursday evening, to start a 150-day science mission on the orbiting laboratory about 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.
Crew-5 is the fifth full-fledged ISS crew that NASA has sent to the International Space Station on a SpaceX rocket since May 2020, when Musk, who owns Tesla, started the private rocket company.
Related: NASA and SpaceX are examining ways to increase the Hubble telescope’s orbit.
Nicole Aunapu Mann, a veteran combat pilot who is also the first indigenous woman to be sent to orbit by NASA and the first woman to sit in the commander’s seat of a SpaceX Crew Dragon, is in charge of the new team.
Anna Kikina, 38, is the only female cosmonaut working for the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the only Russian to fly on an American spacecraft. This is a big deal because the war in Ukraine has caused tensions around the world. In 2002, a NASA space shuttle took the last cosmonaut into space on a U.S. rocket.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
Under a new deal signed by NASA and Roscosmos in July, Kikina is taking the place of a NASA astronaut who took her seat on a Russian Soyuz flight to the ISS last month.
Kikina will be only the fifth Russian woman to go to space. Until now, most cosmonauts have been men.
In a recent interview, she said, “In general, it doesn’t matter to me.” She was referring to the fact that she is a Roscosmos astronaut. “But I know I have to do it because I speak for the people in my country.”
Commander Mann, who is 45 years old and a colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, is a fighter pilot who has flown combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has a Master’s degree in engineering and specialises in fluid mechanics.
Mann will be the first Native American woman to fly to space. She is a member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes. John Herrington was the only other Native American to go into space. He flew on a shuttle mission in 2002.
Josh Cassada, 49, a U.S. Navy aviator and test pilot with a Ph.D. in high-energy particle physics, is Mann’s NASA astronaut classmate and fellow first-time space traveller. He will be the launch’s pilot on Wednesday.
Koichi Wakata, 59, is the last member of the crew from Japan’s space agency, JAXA. He is an expert in robotics and is making his fifth trip to space.
The Crew-5 team will meet seven people who are already living on the ISS: the Crew-4 team, which is made up of three Americans and an Italian astronaut, as well as two Russians and the NASA astronaut who went to space with them on a Soyuz flight.
The new people have to do more than 200 experiments, many of which are related to medical research. For example, they have to “print” human tissue in 3-D and study bacteria grown in microgravity.
The ISS, which is the longest artificial object in space at the length of a football field, has been continuously occupied since November 2000. It is run by a group of countries led by the U.S. and Russia and including Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries.
Related: NASA ordered five additional astronaut missions from SpaceX in a $1.4 billion contract.
The outpost was built in part to improve relations between Washington and Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War rivalries that led to the first U.S.-Soviet space race.
But cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos has been put to the test like never before since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, which made the Biden administration put a lot of sanctions on Moscow.
Sergei Krikalev, a high-ranking Roscosmos official, said at a news conference with NASA and SpaceX on Monday that his agency has permission from Moscow to keep working with the ISS until 2024 and hopes to get “permission” from the Kremlin to keep working together until Russia builds a new space station.
NASA wants to keep the ISS going with the help of its current partners until about 2030.