The four crew members who comprise NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 mission are seated inside the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft during a training session at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. From left are Mission Specialist Andrey Fedyaev, Pilot Woody Hoburg, Commander Stephen Bowen, and Mission Specialist Sultan Al Neyadi.
The launch date for Crew-6, which will transport four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) for a six-month mission, has been set for Feb. 26 by SpaceX and NASA, as reported by Space.com. Mid-February was the original target.
Therefore, the next SpaceX flight with astronauts aboard is expected to happen late next month, assuming everything goes according to plan.
The Next Human-crewed Launch
Launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the SpaceX Dragon capsule Endeavour will be carried into orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket piloted by Crew-6.
The mission's name comes from the fact that it will be SpaceX's sixth contracted astronaut flight to the ISS on behalf of NASA. Crew-6, however, will be SpaceX's ninth human-crewed orbital flight overall.
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Crew-6's Roster
Many different countries are represented on Crew-6. A Russian cosmonaut named Andrey Fedyaev and two NASA astronauts named Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg will be aboard.
Since December 2021, Bowen and Hoburg have been included on the Crew-6 manifest. Fedyaev joined the crew in July 2022 as part of an exchange program between NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian state space agency.
Al Neyadi joined the expedition as the fourth and last crew member in the same month.
Space agency NASA and Axiom Space, the Houston-based business that arranged and oversaw the Ax-1 mission, entered into a contract in 2021. This guaranteed Al Neyadi a spot on Crew-6.
In a blog post last July, NASA officials said that the agency had contracted with Axiom Space to send an astronaut on a Soyuz rotation to the ISS in return for a seat on a future US commercial spacecraft. Notably, the Soyuz is Russia's mainstay manned spacecraft, and it has been used to send humans into orbit for decades.
Axiom also announced a deal with the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in the United Arab Emirates on April 29, 2022, so that the UAE might send a crew member to the company's place.
SpaceX Missions
For a short period of time, Crew-6 will share the ISS with SpaceX's Crew-5, which launched in October 2022. NASA authorities just confirmed that the four members of Crew-5 would be returning to Earth not long after Crew-6 arrived at the station.
SpaceX has now completed the Crew-1 through Crew-5 flights, but these were not the only ones the firm launched.
They sent the Demo-2 test flight and private Ax-1 journey to the orbiting lab in 2020 and 2022, respectively, and the private Inspiration4 mission to Earth orbit in September 2021.
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