Space Coast bustling with 4 crew launches
Before summer, 14 more humans could launch from U.S. soil as SpaceX has three missions set to lift off from Kennedy Space Center on Crew Dragons while Boeing looks to send its CST-100 Starliner up to the International Space Station for the first time with people on board.
“We’re heading into, I would say one of the busiest increments in the history of station,” said Kathryn Lueders, NASA’s associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate at news conference last week. “We have a string of critical missions coming up.”
That includes not only crewed flights from the Space Coast but a replacement Soyuz capsule to be sent up from Russia to the station for one damaged by micrometeorites and resupply missions from SpaceX, Northrop Grumman and Russia in the next four months.
The first crewed flight, though, coming no earlier than Feb. 26 is the Crew-6 mission flying on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour. It is taking up NASA astronaut and mission commander Stephen Bowen, flying for the fourth time, and first-timers pilot Woody Hoburg of NASA, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Liftoff from KSC’s Launch 39-A atop a Falcon 9 rocket is slated for 2:07 a.m.
This is the second SpaceX launch to bring up a Russian cosmonaut, part of the U.S.-Roscosmos exchange that sends up NASA astronauts on Soyuz crews as well. The presence of AlNeyadi, though, marks the first long-term stay of an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates.
“It’s exciting to have another country’s astronaut onboard and it’s exciting to expand human spaceflight across the globe,” said NASA’s Joel Montalbano, manager of the International Space Station Program.
The quartet has more than 250 scientific experiments on their plate for what’s planned to be around
a 180-day stay on board. They take over for Crew-5, who arrived at the ISS back in October and will fly home with a splashdown off Florida’s coast in early March.
Crew-6 joins Expedition 68 on the station, which currently features NASA’s Frank Rubio and two Russian cosmonauts who flew up to the ISS on board a Soyuz spacecraft last September, but that spacecraft suffered damage to its coolant system, leading to Russia’s decision to replace their ride on a launch planned for Feb. 20.
The existing Soyuz will depart the station without anyone on board making way for the replacement vehicle. The trio is now scheduled to remain on board until the fall.
The ISS has been continuously occupied since November 2000, orbiting the Earth about every 90 minutes at around 250 miles altitude on average traveling about 17,500 mph.
The normal population of seven could get bumped twice before the summer with short-duration visits from both Boeing’s Starliner on the Crew Flight Test mission as early as mid-April and the second private Axiom Space mission on a SpaceX Crew Dragon that could come before the end of June.
The Starliner will bring NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launching atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V
rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41. It’s on a planned eight-day mission that if successful will pave the way for Starliner to join SpaceX Crew Dragons for normal ferry service from the U.S. on crew rotation missions to the ISS.
The Ax-2 mission will bring up former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who last flew in 2017 setting an American record with 665 days in space. Now Axiom Space’s Director of Human Space Flight, Whitson will command the crew of four that also features aviator John Shoffner as pilot and two mission specialist seats paid for by the Saudi Space Commission. The names of those two have not been released.
On the schedule for no earlier than March, and shoehorned between Crew-6 and Ax-2 but not headed for the ISS, is a third SpaceX Crew Dragon mission from KSC — Polaris Dawn.
It’s the first of three planned private missions dubbed the Polaris Program spearheaded by billionaire Jared Isaacman that will fly him and three others on board the same spacecraft that flew him on the threeday orbital flight Inspiration4 back in fall 2021 — the Crew Dragon Resilience.
Also flying are Scott Poteet, given the title of mission pilot, specialist Sarah Gillis, and specialist and medical officer Anna
Menon. Both Gillis and Menon are SpaceX employees.
The mission plans to let at least one of the four crew venture outside the spacecraft on a tethered spacewalk during five days of orbiting the Earth at more than 853 miles altitude, which would break a mark set by Gemini 11 in 1966 for crewed low-Earth orbit.
SpaceX has surged ahead of Boeing with its crew capsule since 2020. Both had been running at similar paces in 2019, but Boeing’s first attempt to rendezvous with the ISS in December of that year failed, causing more than a year and a half of delays before finally making a successful docking last May.
Crew-6 marks SpaceX’s sixth operational flight with Crew-7 planned this fall. With With private missions Ax-1 and Inspiration4 already under its belt, the four existing Crew Dragon spacecraft — Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance and Freedom — have flown eight times with humans on board. That total could grow to 12 by the end of the year.
“We actually have one more Crew Dragon vehicle in early stages of production now,” said SpaceX’s Sarah Walker, director of Dragon Mission Management. “We expect it to come online and enter the flight rotation late next year, I believe. So that’ll bring us to a total of three cargo vehicles and five crew vehicles.”