{"id":282243,"date":"2026-02-13T13:16:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T13:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/282243\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T13:16:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T13:16:09","slug":"four-people-on-nasas-crew-12-mission-launch-to-space-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/282243\/","title":{"rendered":"Four people on NASA’s Crew-12 mission launch to space : NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

\n The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission pose for a portrait at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. From left: Russian cosmonaut and Mission Specialist Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, pilot and commander respectively, and European Space Agency astronaut and Mission Specialist Sophie Adenot.<\/p>\n

SpaceX via NASA<\/p>\n

hide caption\n <\/p>\n

toggle caption<\/p>\n

SpaceX via NASA<\/p>\n

Four people are headed to the International Space Station after a predawn Friday liftoff<\/a> from Cape Canaveral in Florida. <\/p>\n

\"A<\/a> <\/p>\n

When the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off, it briefly turned the inky-black sky into daylight, as it roared to orbit on a nine-minute journey to space. The crew is expected to dock with the space station on Saturday afternoon, Eastern time.<\/p>\n

The space station has been operating with a reduced staff of three people since last month. Typically, these NASA crew rotations overlap so the arriving astronauts can spend a few days with the previous crew for a knowledge transfer. But NASA’s last mission, Crew-11<\/a>, departed earlier than planned<\/a>: in January, a month ahead of schedule. NASA said a crew member had a “serious” but stable health condition<\/a>. It was the first medical evacuation<\/a> in the orbital lab’s 26-year history.<\/p>\n

The Crew-12 mission<\/a> includes two NASA astronauts: commander Jessica Meir and pilot Jack Hathaway. Also aboard the Crew Dragon capsule is Sophie Adenot, a French astronaut with the European Space Agency, and Andrey Fedyaev, a Russian cosmonaut. The four are scheduled to spend eight months aboard the station conducting science and research and performing maintenance on the outpost. <\/p>\n

This is the second trip to the space station for Meir and Fedyaev and the first time in space for Hathaway and Adenot. <\/p>\n

Meir set a record on her last visit to the space station in 2019 when she and NASA astronaut Christina Koch conducted the first all-female spacewalk<\/a>. They spent more than seven hours outside the space station replacing a broken battery charger. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission pose for a portrait at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282244,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-282243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282243\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}