SpaceX Launches Four Astronauts To The ISS

JAKARTA - Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, will launch the next long-duration crew of astronauts from NASA to the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday morning, April 27. These astronauts include a medical doctor turned space explorer and a geologist who specializes in landslides on Mars.

The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Crew Dragon capsule dubbed the Freedom, is scheduled to take off with its four crew members at 3:52 a.m. EDT (2:52 p.m. EDT) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

If all goes according to plan, three US astronauts and a European Space Agency (ESA) crew from Italy will reach the space station about 17 hours later to begin a six-month science mission orbiting about 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.

During a pre-launch briefing on Tuesday, April 26, NASA officials said forecasts called for a 90% chance of favorable weather conditions for liftoff on time.

"Flying safely with a crew means you have to take it one step at a time," Kathryn Lueders, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, said in a press jump with the media. "We hope you will see a very, very beautiful step, and we will bring our crew safely into orbit."

The latest mission, called Crew 4, will mark the fourth full ISS crew that NASA has sent into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket. The private rocket company founded by Musk began flying astronauts from the US space agency in 2020. In all, SpaceX has launched six human spaceflights before, over the past two years.

In this mission the commander of Crew 4 is Dr. Kjell Lindgren, 49, is a board-certified emergency medicine physician and surgeon who has made one flight to the ISS. This was his second trip to the ISS, where he recorded a record 141 life days in orbit in 2015.

During the expedition, he made two space trips and participated in more than 100 science projects. Including the "Veggie" lettuce experiment which marked the first time a US crew member ate a plant grown in orbit.

The pilot designated for the mission was rookie astronaut Bob Hines, 47, a US Air Force fighter pilot, test pilot, and flight instructor who has accumulated more than 3.500 hours of flight time on 50 aircraft types. It has also flown 76 combat missions.

Another crew member who made his space debut as a mission specialist is Jessica Watkins, 33, a geologist who earned a doctorate in studying the processes behind massive landslides on Mars and Earth. He later joined the science team for the Mars rover Curiosity at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Crew 4's flight will make Watkins the first African-American woman to join a long-range mission on the International Space Station. He follows in the footsteps of seven other black astronauts who have boarded the ISS since it was founded more than two decades ago.

The final Crew 4 member was Samantha Cristoforetti (45), an ESA astronaut and Italian Air Force jet pilot who made his second flight to the space station. She is scheduled to take command of ISS operations during her six-month team assignment, becoming the first woman in Europe to be stationed there.

Cristoforetti and Watkins previously served together as aquanauts in the underwater habitat of Aquarius from NASA's Extreme Environment Mission (NEEMO) mission in 2019.

The Crew 4 team will be greeted on board by the seven current occupants of the ISS, the four members of Crew 3 they will replace, three American astronauts, and a German ESA crew who will conclude their mission in early May, as well as three Russian cosmonauts.

The launch comes less than two days after a separate four-person team organized by Houston-based company Axiom Space returned from a two-week mission as the ISS's first private astronaut crew, which launched Monday in a separate SpaceX capsule.