Launch of the next commercial manned mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is targeted for mid-February by NASA and SpaceX.
The Crew Dragon Endeavor, launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, will take a four-person team to orbit. They will stay in space for around six months to research and maintain the ISS.
The four crew members who comprise the SpaceX Crew-6 mission pose for a photo in their spacesuits during a training session at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. From left are, Mission Specialist Andrey Fedyaev, Pilot Warren “Woody” Hoburg, Commander Stephen Bowen, and Mission Specialist Sultan Al Neyadi.
The Crew Dragon Endeavor on its Way to the Space
The scheduled liftoff time for NASA's next manned mission is drawing closer, according to Space.com's report.
As SpaceX's tenth crewed trip, Crew-6 will use the Dragon Endeavor, which has previously flown Demo-2, Crew-2, and Axiom Space's Ax-1 mission.
The crew of Endeavor will consist of four people: NASA's Mission Commander Stephen Bowen and Pilot Woody Hoburg, UAE's Sultan Al Neyadi, and mission specialist and cosmonaut of Roscosmos Andrey Fedyaev.
Except for Bowen, who has flown three previous trips to the ISS on the space shuttle, all of the members of Crew-6 will be making their first trip into space.
Crew-6 will need some time to adjust to life on the space station. Thus there will be a brief overlap in crew members during this time.
When Crew-6 arrives, the number of people living on the ISS will increase to eleven in the days before Crew-5 and the Dragon Endurance spacecraft that brought them there leave.
SpaceX's Crew-7 mission is expected to arrive at the ISS in the autumn of 2023, extending the tenure of the Crew-6 astronauts.
A mock up of the Crew Dragon spacecraft is displayed during a media tour of SpaceX headquarters and rocket factory on August 13, 2018 in Hawthorne, California.
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Choosing the Crew-6 Lineup
It was in December 2021 when Bowen and Hoburg were officially listed as members of Crew-6.
In July 2022, NASA and Roscosmos (Russia's space agency) agreed to a crew exchange, which sent Fedyaev aboard. Ten days following the news of the crew switch between NASA and Roscosmos, Al Neyadi was added as the last member of Crew-6 on July 25, 2022.
The inclusion of Al Neyadi was a part of a 2021 contract between NASA and Axiom Space that called for a NASA astronaut to take part in a Soyuz trip to the ISS in return for a future seat for Axiom Space on a commercial US launch.
Axiom Space and the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in the UAE collaborated to fill that seat in April of last year. Eventually, Al Neyadi was chosen, as stated in a NASA news release.
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