NASA Targets Monday For Crew-6 Launch

NASA and SpaceX are targeting Monday, Feb. 27, for the launch of the Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station (ISS). If all goes according to plan, the mission will depart from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center at 1:45 a.m. local time, carrying NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev to the ISS for a six-month scientific research mission. More than 200 experiments and technology demonstrations are planned for their stay including studies on how materials burn in microgravity, tissue chip research on heart, brain and cartilage functions, and investigating microbial samples collected from the outside of the space station.

Crew-6 is the sixth crew rotation mission for SpaceX as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. It will use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, Endeavour, which has previously flown to the ISS on the NASA Demo-2, NASA Crew-2 and Axiom Space Ax-1 missions. According to NASA, an integrated static fire test and dry dress rehearsal with the crew will take place prior to the launch. The agency reported that weather officials with Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s 45th Weather Squadron have predicted that there is a 95 percent chance of favorable weather conditions for Monday’s launch window.