Washington:
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch to the International Space Station was postponed Monday, with officials citing problems with ground systems.
The SpaceX Dragon Crew-6 mission was scheduled to depart at 1:45 a.m. (0645 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying two NASA astronauts, one a Russian cosmonaut and the other an Emirati for space travel.
But just two minutes before liftoff, the launch was called off, or “cleaned”.
“Today’s #Crew6 launch was scrambled due to a problem with the launch ground system,” NASA posted on Twitter.
SpaceX said shortly after that it had begun offloading fuel from the rocket and that the crew would take off.
The launch will be rescheduled for a later date.
Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoberg of NASA, Andrey Fadeev of Russia and Sultan Al-Neyadi of the United Arab Emirates are to spend six months on the orbiting station.
Neyadi, 41, will be the fourth astronaut from an Arab country and the second from the oil-rich UAE to travel to space; His compatriot Hazza al-Mansoori flew in for an eight-day mission in 2019.
Neyadi described the upcoming mission as a “great honor”.
Hauberg, the Endeavor pilot, and Fedyaev, the Russian mission specialist, will also be making their first space flights.
Fadeev is the second Russian cosmonaut to fly to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket. NASA astronauts regularly fly to the station on Russian Soyuz vehicles.
Space remains a rare site of cooperation between Moscow and Washington as the Russian offensive in Ukraine put the two in sharp opposition.
Such exchanges have continued despite those tensions.
Bowen, a veteran of three space shuttle missions, said politics rarely comes to the fore in space.
The commander said, “We are all professionals. We remain focused on the mission.” “We’ve always had a great relationship with the astronauts once they get into space.”
While aboard the ISS, Crew 6 members will conduct dozens of experiments, including burning materials in microgravity and researching heart, brain and cartilage function.
The current crew is the sixth to be carried by a SpaceX rocket to the ISS. The Endeavor capsule has flown into space three times.
NASA pays SpaceX to fly astronauts to the ISS approximately every six months.
The space agency expects Crew-6 to have a handover of several days with the four members of Crew-5, who have been on the ISS since October. Crew-5 will then return to Earth.
rescue capsule
The ISS also houses astronauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio.
They were due to return home on March 28 but the cooling system of their Soyuz MS-22 capsule was damaged by a small meteorite while docked with the ISS in December.
An unmanned Russian Soyuz capsule, MS-23, lifted off from Kazakhstan on Friday to bring the three astronauts home. They are now scheduled to return to Earth in September.
Construction of the ISS began in 1998 at a time of increased US–Russia cooperation following the Cold War space race.
Russia has been using the old but reliable Soyuz capsule to carry astronauts into space since the 1960s.
But in recent years, Russia’s space program has been beset by problems that have resulted in the loss of satellites and vehicles.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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