A mission scheduled for Saturday to bring three American astronauts and a Russian astronaut to the International Space Station (ISS) was canceled due to bad weather.
space x NASA announced that the launch had been delayed, with NASA now targeting launch at 10:53 p.m. Sunday.
SpaceX's Crew Dragon, named Endeavor, will carry four people from Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket.
Hours before the launch, scheduled for Saturday night, SpaceX posted on X that the launch had been delayed due to “strong winds.”
This is the latest delay in the release, which was originally scheduled for February 22nd.
Elon Musk's SpaceX has been providing astronaut launch services to NASA under NASA's Commercial Crew Program since 2020, but a competing program with Boeing has not yet begun.
Matthew Dominick, who is leading the Crew-8 mission, is making his first spaceflight, as is fellow American Janet Epps. It will also be a first for Russia's Alexander Grebenkin.
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This will be physician Michael Barratt's third visit to the ISS. His first two were aboard the Space Shuttle, which was decommissioned in 2011.
In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, space remains a rare area of cooperation between the United States and Russia.
The United States last month imposed new sanctions on 500 Russian targets and also sought costs for the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a Siberian prison.
The crew will utilize the microgravity environment to create organoids (artificially grown artificially grown organs that resemble organs) using stem cells to study degenerative diseases, allowing three-dimensional cell growth not possible on Earth. Conduct experiments such as creating cell clumps).
Joel Montalbano, NASA's International Space Station program manager, told reporters that the United States is closely monitoring a “small leak” on the Russian side of the research platform, which is one of several recent incidents on the Russian side. He said this is the latest of a number of issues.
The hatch is currently closed to isolate leaks from other parts of the ISS.
Written by Garyn Lambly ©Agence France-Presse
