SpaceX and NASA again strapped four space travelers back into their seats, and this time it paid off with a successful launch of the Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station early Thursday, just days after the first attempt was scrubbed right before liftoff.
The Falcon 9 rocket topped with Crew Dragon Endeavour making a record fourth trip to space blasted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39-A at 12:34 a.m.
“Once again on behalf of the entire SpaceX team, we are honored to have you aboard Dragon capsule Endeavour on its next trip to the International Space Station,” said SpaceX’s mission control lead Arthur Barriault with less than 10 minutes before launch. “We wish you a great mission. Good luck. Godspeed. And enjoy the ride.”
“Our crew is ready for launch,” replied Mission commander NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen. “We really want to thank everyone and appreciate the great call — much appreciated call for the scrub the other night. It was a great learning opportunity for our crew.”
Bowen, the only veteran astronaut on the crew, now has made his fourth trip to space. He leads three rookies: fellow NASA astronaut and pilot Woody Hoburg, mission specialists United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi and mission specialist Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, who had about a 24-hour trip before arriving at the ISS.
“Just want to say as a rookie flyer that was one heck of a ride. Thank you,” Hoburg said. “I would say it was an absolute miracle of engineering and I just feel so lucky that I get to fly on this amazing machine.”
The quartet already made one trip to the pad this week only to be stymied with less than three minutes to go early Monday.
The scrub came after a ground issue prevented SpaceX from confirming the proper amount of ignition fluid for propellant was flowing into the Falcon 9 rocket’s engines. Post-scrub inspection revealed the culprit was a clogged filter, which was replaced.
“I want to thank you for the great ride to orbit today,” Bowen said. “It may have taken two rides, two times, but it was worth the trip.”
In the redo, astronauts walked out for their ride back to the launch pad at 9:15 p.m. Wednesday climbing into the new black feet of Teslas and venturing up the launch tower to retake their seats in the crew capsule. The redo went off without a hitch, and with less than an hour before liftoff, the launch director polled teams and mission managers gave the “go for launch” decision. Teams retracted the Crew Access Arm, armed the emergency abort system and began loading of one million pounds of propellant into the rocket.
“Word of encouragement, enjoy yourself while you’re laying there strapped in on your back trying to get off the face of the Earth,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson ahead of launch. As a member of a Space Shuttle Columbia flight in 1986, his mission saw four scrubs before finally lifting off. “But the serious words of encouragement is we don’t fly until we think it’s safe. And that was what was important about the first scrub because it just didn’t feel right. And NASA made the call. It was the right call.”
“It kind of seems like a cliché because we say it over and over. Spaceflight is hard,” said Kathryn Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate. “When you look at all the things that have to be done perfectly to make sure we’re flying safely. It is hard, and it’s that attention to detail that makes us ensure that we’re flying our crew safely. And so you just got to step through it carefully. I tell the team one step at a time.”
Derrol Nail with NASA communications was joined again by NASA astronaut Raja Chari who flew on the Crew-3 mission in 2021 for live coverage leading up to liftoff.
“Glad to be back here and hoping the second time’s the charm and hoping to see my first launch,” said Chari, who has never viewed a live launch from KSC, only been a passenger on one.
“We’re excited to light them up tonight,” Nail said.
The first-stage booster making its first flight made a successful recovery landing on the SpaceX droneship Just Read the Instruction in the Atlantic Ocean.
Docking is slated to occur after Endeavour’s rendezvous with station at 1:17 a.m. Friday with a hatch opening at 3:27 a.m. as the crew joins the seven already on board the ISS as part of Expedition 68. The four members of Crew-5 awaiting their replacements would undock a few days after arrival for a return trip to Earth in their own Crew Dragon with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.
AlNeyadi, who became the fourth astronaut from an Arab nation to go to space, introduced the zero-gravity indicator, a stuffed astronaut doll that had actually flown to the ISS in 2019 with the UAE’s first astronaut.
“Launch was incredible. Amazing,” AlNeyadi said. “Allow me to introduce our fifth crew member. His name is Suhail, and Suhail is the Arabic name for the star Canopus. In the Middle East, we anticipate the appearance of Canopus because it marks the end of summer and the beginning of cool times. Canopus is actually the second brightest star in the night sky.”
The doll is the UAE’s first official space mascot designed to generate interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) among children.
Crew-6 will spend about six months on board during which they will welcome a steady stream of launch vehicles visiting the station including resupply runs in March and April and then two different crewed missions, the first humans to fly on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, which is expected in mid- to late-April followed by the four members of the second Axiom Space private mission to visit the station as early as May.
“This next four or five months is just going to be incredible for the International Space Station. It’s a really busy port for a lot of vehicles coming up,” Lueders said. “There’s no rest for the wicked and these people must be very wicked because they’re not getting a break, or not much of a break in here. But honestly, this is what we dreamed that the space station program would be doing at this stage. We dreamed that we’d be having cargo vehicles and crew vehicles, because this is when we get to maximize the use and the science that’s created on the International Space Station.”
They also have about 200 science experiments and technology demonstrations to perform.
“They’ve got a wide range of research objectives, including investigations aimed at furthering capabilities that we will need for going beyond low-Earth orbit,” said Dana Weigel, NASA’s deputy manager for the ISS program during the flight readiness review this week.
Other science on tap will be studying how things burn in microgravity as well as tissue chip research on heart, brain and cartilage functions, she said.
Bowen previously launched on Space Shuttle Endeavour, Atlantis and Discovery, but this will be his first trip for a long-term stay on board the station. The rest are rookies.
Crew Dragon Endeavour was the first SpaceX capsule to take astronauts to space flying the Demo-2 mission in May 2020 and returning humans to spaceflight from the U.S. for the first time since the end of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011. Endeavour has since flown Crew-2 and the first private astronaut mission to the ISS for Axiom Space.
This marks SpaceX’s sixth operational crew flight to the station and ninth Crew Dragon flight with humans on board overall including two private missions and Demo-2. There are three more Crew Dragon missions planed for 2023. Each of the company’s current fleet of four capsules — Endeavour, Endurance, Resilience and Freedom — are rated for five flights. A fifth capsule is planned to come online in 2024.
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