SpaceX’s mission to the International Space Station has been delayed two and a half minutes after liftoff

the NASA and SpaceX Postpone First thing Monday morning capsule release With two American astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a crew member from the United Arab Emirates minutes before take off Scheduled from Florida on a trip to the International Space Station.

the US space agency and SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, It was alleged that there was a technical malfunction related to the ignition fluid Used to start the ship’s engines.

The countdown seemed to progress smoothly until about two and a half minutes before take off.when NASA announced on its live broadcast that the launch of the four-man crew on a science mission had been delayed by six months.

Launching #Crew6 was today It was canceled due to a land systems problemNASA tweeted. SpaceX indicated shortly after that it had begun removing fuel from the rocket and indicated that the crew would disembark.

It was planned to be Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX, equipped with the Crew Dragon capsule, will lift off at 1:45 a.m. EDT (6.45 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Originally scheduled for Sunday, the liftoff was actually delayed by NASA by 24 hours.

“The next available launch attempt is 12:34 a.m. Thursday, March 2, pending resolution of the technical issue that prevented launch on Monday,” SpaceX said.

Last-minute launch checks are somewhat of a routine in the complex and risky project of human spaceflight.

If Monday’s launch was successful, The crew is expected to take about 25 hours to reach their destination on the International Space Station (ISS, for its English acronym), a laboratory orbiting 420 kilometers above Earth.

The mission, dubbed Crew 6, will carry the sixth long-duration International Space Station crew NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since Musk, the California-based company, began sending American astronauts into orbit in May 2020.

He leads the last crew from the International Space Station Mission Commander Stephen BowenThe 59-year-old is a former US Navy submarine officer who logged more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three space shuttle flights and seven spacewalks.

Another NASA astronaut, Warren “Woody” HoburgThe engineer and commercial pilot designate Crew 6 pilot, 37, will make his first spaceflight.

The Crew 6 mission is also notable for its inclusion in Emirati astronaut Sultan Al NeyadiAt 41 years old, he is the second person from his country to fly into space and the first person to take off from US soil as part of a long-duration space station crew. The first astronaut in the history of the UAE was launched into orbit in 2019 on a Russian spacecraft.

The four-man ‘Crew 6’ wrap-up is Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev41, who, like Al Neyadi, is an engineer and spaceflight rookie designated as the team’s mission specialist.

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

Crew 6 He will be welcomed aboard the space station by seven current ISS passengersThree American NASA crew members, including Commander Nicole Onabu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly in space, along with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.

The International Space Station, which is the length of a football field and the largest man-made object in space, has been continuously operated by a US-Russian consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

(With information from Reuters and AFP)

Read on: