NASA is now aiming to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, in another delay over weather conditions, the US agency announced Tuesday.
It is targeting February 13 for the lift-off of Crew-12’s mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with a window opening at 5:15am local time (1015 GMT).
“Mission teams completed a weather review Tuesday morning and have waived off the Thursday, Feb. 12, launch opportunity due to forecast weather conditions along Crew-12’s flight path,” NASA said in a statement.
Weather at the site in Florida has been in fact favorable, NASA officials told a briefing Monday, but higher winds forecast across the rest of the East Coast are to blame for the delays.
These winds could complicate any potential emergency maneuvers, like an early splashdown of the spacecraft carrying the astronauts, for example.
If Friday’s launch goes as planned, the astronauts should arrive at the space station by approximately 3:15 pm on Saturday.
Crew-12 is composed of Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, along with French astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
They remain in quarantine in NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, waiting to blast off.
The travelers will replace Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January a month earlier than planned in the first medical evacuation in the space station’s history.
ISS, a scientific laboratory orbiting 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, has since been staffed by a skeleton crew of three.
Continuously inhabited for the last quarter-century, the aging ISS is scheduled to be de-orbited and crashed into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean in 2030.
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