A SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts is on its way to the International Space Station, a journey that will bring the orbiting laboratory back to full staff after a month of operating with a skeleton crew.
The mission, called Crew-12, lifted off at around 5:17 a.m. ET Friday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft is expected to dock with the ISS Saturday afternoon.
NASA, which contracts SpaceX for the astronauts’ transport to and from the space station, had sought to expedite the Crew-12 launch originally slated for takeoff on February 15 due to the staffing situation. But the agency had to forgo two possible launch windows on Wednesday and Thursday because of unfavorable weather along the rocket’s flight path.
SpaceX could have expedited the launch even more, as the spacecraft and rocket flying this mission were processed ahead of schedule, noted Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, in a Friday morning news briefing. But NASA also had to get the astronauts ready to fly.
“When you look at the totality of a mission, it’s getting the vehicles, the hardware and the software ready and also the crew,” Stich said. “And so in this case, crew training was what drove the date that we selected.”
The International Space Station has been operating with three people on board well below the seven-person staff the space agency desires since mid-January.
The new launch comes after a previous SpaceX staffing mission, Crew-11, was forced to make an early return to Earth because of an undisclosed medical issue by an unidentified member.
“I’ll say it again, that this mission has shown, in many ways, what it means to be mission focused at NASA,” space agency chief Jared Isaacman said Friday.
“Just to recap, in the last couple of weeks, we brought Crew-11 home early. We pulled forward Crew-12 to today all while simultaneously making preparations for the Artemis II mission,” he added, referring to NASA’s upcoming moon mission that’s slated to take off as soon as March.
Upon Crew-11’s splashdown return off the coast of California, all four astronauts went to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. The crew which included NASA’s Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov of Russia later appeared at a news conference.
“How we handled everything all the way through, from nominal operations to this unforeseen operation, really bodes well for future exploration,” Fincke said.
Source: CNN News
