Elon Musk’s SpaceX is ready to launch the next International Space Station crew for NASA

The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously powered Crew Dragon capsule named Endeavour, lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 1:45 a.m. EST (0645 GMT) was set for liftoff.

The four-member crew should reach the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday morning, about 25 hours later, to begin a six-month mission in microgravity aboard the orbiting laboratory about 250 miles (420 km) from Earth.

Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-term ISS crew that NASA has flown on SpaceX since the private rocket venture founded by Musk – the billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla and social media platform Twitter – launched US astronauts into orbit in May. started sending. 2020.

NASA said a review of the mission’s launch readiness was completed Saturday, and the flight had been given the “go” to proceed to liftoff as planned.

“All systems in and weather looking good for launch,” Musk wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

The latest ISS crew is led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a one-time US Navy submarine officer who has logged more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three space shuttle flights and seven spacewalks.

Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoberg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator designated as a Crew 6 pilot, will make his first spaceflight.

The Crew 6 mission is also notable for the inclusion of UAE astronaut Sultan Alnedi, 41, who is only the second person from his country to go into space and launch from US soil as part of the long-duration space station team. He is the first person to do so. The UAE’s first astronaut entered orbit in 2019 aboard a Russian spacecraft.

Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 is 41-year-old Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, who like Alnedi is an engineer and spaceflight rookie designated as a mission specialist for the team.

Fadeev is the latest astronaut to fly on a US spacecraft under a ride-sharing deal signed in July by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite rising tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Crew 6 team will be greeted on the space station by seven current ISS occupants – three American NASA crew members, including Commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly in space, three Russian and one Japanese astronaut .

The ISS, about the length of a football field and the largest artificial object in space, is continuously operated by a US-Russia-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

The outpost was conceived as a way to improve relations between Washington and Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War rivalry that spawned the original US-Soviet space race in the 1950s and 1960s.

NASA-Roscosmos cooperation was tested as never before since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year earlier led to the United States imposing sweeping sanctions against Moscow as well as a steady increase in military aid to the Ukrainian government Did.

The Crew 6 mission also follows two recent accidents involving a coolant leak from a Russian spacecraft docked to the orbiting laboratory, which apparently caused micrometeoroids, tiny grains of space rock, to streak through space and high altitudes. Velocity kills the craft.

One of the affected Russian vehicles was the Soyuz crew capsule that carried two cosmonauts and an astronaut to the space station in September for a six-month mission that is now set to end in March. An empty replacement Soyuz took off on Friday to bring them home and arrived at the space station on Saturday.