NASA and SpaceX delay sending four astronauts to ISS due to bad weather

The NASA And
SpaceX The launch of the rocket, which was supposed to send four astronauts, was postponed until Wednesday
International Space Station In order to avoid “a major storm system,” the U.S. company announced Saturday.

The crew of this “Crew-3” mission was scheduled to set sail on Sunday Capsule Crew Dragon Baptized “Endurance” attached to the Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The launch will finally take place on Wednesday at 1:10 a.m. (5:10 GMT) local time, and “Crew-3 will arrive at the space station at about 11:00 a.m. (03:00 GMT Thursday) the same evening,” NASA said.

Crossing the Baton with Thomas Basket

They will then go on a “brief handover” with the astronauts who flew to the airport as part of an agency called SpaceX Crew-2. French Thomas Baskett, InISS Since April, he added.

SpaceX said on its website on Thursday, November 4, that “relief will be available” if Wednesday’s re-launch becomes impossible.

The crew-3 is the third regular unmanned aerial mission by SpaceX on behalf of NASA, and is part of a multi-billion dollar deal signed by a US agency with Elon Musk’s private company after it was shut down for its own space shuttle program in 2011.

An experiment for growing plants in space

The Crew-3 team will spend six months in orbit and conduct research aimed at facilitating future long-range space exploration or reviving useful knowledge on Earth.

This work involves experimenting with growing plants in space without soil or other growth substrate. The other aims to produce optical fibers in microgravity, which, according to research already done, will deliver higher quality than those produced in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Crew-3 astronauts will undertake space missions to complete the renovation of the ISS’s solar panels, and they will make two cruises: the Japanese were brought in by the Russian Soyuz spacecraft later this year, and then the passengers on the Space-X Axiom mission. , Scheduled for February 2022.