NASA has announced an earlier-than-expected target date to launch the next astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).<\/p>\n
The agency is now targeting Feb. 11 for liftoff of the SpaceX<\/a> Crew-12 mission, which will fly four astronauts to join the skeleton crew presently operating the orbital lab. A scant three are currently covering the maintenance and science investigations aboard the ISS<\/a>, left behind on Jan. 14 by the early departure of Crew-11<\/a> on the station’s first-ever medical evacuation<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Crew-12 astronauts were already in line to take the Crew-11 quartet’s place but had originally been scheduled to overlap with them before their return to Earth<\/a>. SpaceX and NASA<\/a> had originally targeted Feb. 15 for Crew-12’s launch but managed to get the mission’s Crew Dragon<\/a> spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket<\/a> ready ahead of schedule.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Crew-12 includes NASA astronauts Jessica Meir (the mission’s commander) and Jack Hathaway (pilot) and mission specialists Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency<\/a> and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev<\/a>. Fedyaev was a relatively late replacement for cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, who was pulled off Crew-12 in early December<\/a>, possibly for violating U.S. national security regulations.<\/p>\n The quartet will fly the Crew Dragon capsule “Grace” to the ISS for a longer-than-normal assignment, lasting nine months instead of the typical six.<\/p>\n It will be the second spaceflight for Meir and Fedyaev, and Fedyaev’s second long-duration mission. Hathaway and Adenot are both spaceflight rookies headed to orbit for the first time.<\/p>\n The launch window for Crew-12 opens on Feb. 11 at 6:00 a.m. EST (1100 GMT), with liftoff scheduled from Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.<\/p>\n The Crew-12 astronauts will join NASA’s Chris Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev as a part of ISS Expedition 74, which will eventually transition to Expedition 75 before the end of Crew-12’s rotation.<\/p>\n NASA pegs the Feb. 11 target as the mission’s earliest possible launch date and has designated backup dates in the event of a delay. If Crew-12 doesn’t manage to get off the ground Feb. 11, there are opportunities on Feb. 12 and Feb. 13, at 5:38 a.m. and 5:15 a.m. EST (1038 and 1015 GMT), respectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA has announced an earlier-than-expected target date to launch the next astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":444149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-444148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=444148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/444148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=444148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=444148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=444148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}