Russian cosmonaut hitchhikes with SpaceX as part of next space station crew

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida –

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX was scheduled to launch the next long-term crew of the International Space Station into orbit on Wednesday, with a Russian cosmonaut set to ride with two Americans and a Japanese astronaut as part of the mission.

The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon capsule called Endurance, was scheduled to lift off at 12:00 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The crew of four was due to reach the International Space Station (ISS) about 29 hours later Thursday evening to begin a 150-day science mission aboard the orbital laboratory about 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.

The mission, dubbed Crew-5, is the fifth full-fledged ISS crew that NASA has flown aboard a SpaceX vehicle since the private rocket company founded by Tesla owner Musk began airing US astronauts in May 2020 to send.

“All spacecraft systems are operational,” SpaceX commentator Kate Tice said during a live NASA webcast on pre-flight activity about three hours before launch, adding that “at this point everything is looking good for the weather.”

The astronauts had just emerged from the Space Center’s operations building in their white and black spacesuits and helmets to wave well-wishers and say goodbye to loved ones before being driven to the launch pad a few kilometers away.

The newest team is led by Nicole Aunapu Mann, 45, a veteran fighter pilot who made space history both as the first Indigenous woman sent into orbit by NASA and the first woman to occupy the command seat of a SpaceX Crew Dragon took.

The Crew-5 mission is also notable for the inclusion of Anna Kikina, 38, the lone female cosmonaut on active duty with Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, who, despite US-Russia tensions over the war in Ukraine, made a rare flight aboard an American spaceship undertakes. The last cosmonaut to go into orbit on a US rocket ship was in a NASA space shuttle in 2002.

LOVE FROM RUSSIA

Kikina is essentially swapping places with a NASA astronaut who took her place aboard a Russian Soyuz flight to the ISS last month, under a new rideshare deal signed by NASA and Roscosmos in July.

Commander Mann, a US Marine Corps colonel and fighter pilot who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, holds a master’s degree in engineering with a specialization in fluid dynamics. She is also among the first group of 18 astronauts selected for NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions, which are expected to return humans to the moon later this decade, more than half a century after the end of the Apollo lunar program.

As a registered member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, Mann will be the first Native American woman to fly into space. The only other Native American to be put into orbit was John Herrington, who flew on a shuttle mission in 2002.

The designated pilot for Wednesday’s launch is Mann’s NASA astronaut classmate and space rookie Josh Cassada, 49, a US Navy aviator and test pilot with a PhD in high-energy particle physics.

Rounding out the crew from Japan’s space agency JAXA is veteran astronaut Koichi Wakata, 59, a robotics expert making his fifth trip into space.

The Crew 5 team will be greeted by seven existing ISS occupants – the Crew 4 team, which consists of three Americans and one Italian astronaut – plus two Russians and the NASA astronaut who was with them on a Soyuz flight in flown the orbit.

The newcomers are tasked with conducting more than 200 experiments, many focused on medical research ranging from 3-D “bioprinting” of human tissue to studying bacteria grown in microgravity.

The ISS, the length of a soccer field and the largest man-made object in space, has been manned continuously since November 2000 and is operated by a US-Russian-led consortium including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

The outpost was founded in part to improve relations between Washington and Moscow following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War rivalries that fueled the original US-Soviet space race. Cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos has been tested like never before since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, prompting the United States to impose sweeping sanctions on Moscow.

During a press conference with NASA and SpaceX on Monday, a senior Roscosmos official, Sergei Krikalev, said his agency has approval from Moscow to continue the ISS through 2024 and hopes to get the Kremlin’s “permission” to further expand the partnership, until Russia builds a new space station.

NASA hopes to keep the ISS running with its existing partners until around 2030.

reporting by Joe Skipper in Cape Canaveral and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Additional coverage by Joey Roulette in Washington; Edited by Lincoln Feast and Will Dunham