US space agency NASA says SpaceX Crew-12 will lift off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida to the orbiting scientific laboratory early Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\t The mission will be replacing Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January, a month earlier than planned, during the first medical evacuation in the space station\u2019s history.<\/p>\n Meir, a marine biologist and physiologist and daughter of an Iraqi-Israeli father and Swedish mother<\/a>, served as a flight engineer on a 2019-2020 expedition to the space station and participated in the first all-female spacewalks.<\/p>\n Since then, she\u2019s given birth to her daughter. She reflected Sunday on the challenges of being a parent and what is due to be an eight-month separation from her child.<\/p>\n \u201cIt does make it a lot difficult in preparing to leave and thinking about being away from her for that long, especially when she\u2019s so young, it\u2019s really a large chunk of her life,\u201d Meir said.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I hope that one day, she will really realize that this absence was a meaningful one, because it was an adventure that she got to share into and that she\u2019ll have memories about, and hopefully it will inspire her and other people around the world,\u201d Meir added.<\/p>\n When the astronauts finally get on board the ISS, they will be one of the last crews to live on board the football field-sized space station.<\/p>\n Continuously inhabited for the last quarter century, the ageing ISS is scheduled to be pushed into Earth\u2019s orbit before crashing into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean in 2030.<\/p>\n The other Crew-12 astronauts are Jack Hathaway of NASA, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\tNASA astronaut Jessica Meir on a space walk outside the ISS, with the earth in the background. (NASA)<\/p>\n
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