Washington:
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launch to the International Space Station was delayed Monday, with officials citing problems with ground systems.
The SpaceX Dragon Crew-6 mission was scheduled to depart Florida’s Kennedy Space Center at 1:45 a.m. (0645 GMT), carrying two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and the second Emirati to travel to space.
But just two minutes before launch, the launch was called off or “scrubbed”.
“Today’s #Crew6 launch has been canceled due to a ground systems issue,” NASA wrote on Twitter.
SpaceX said shortly afterwards that it had begun unloading fuel from the rocket and the crew would disembark.
The launch will be moved to a later date.
NASA’s Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russia’s Andrey Fedyaev and United Arab Emirates’ Sultan al-Neyadi will spend six months on the orbiting station.
Neyadi, 41, becomes the fourth astronaut from an Arab country and the second from the oil-rich UAE to travel to space; his compatriot Hazzaa al-Mansoori flew an eight-day mission in 2019.
Neyadi described the upcoming mission as a “great honour”.
Hoburg, the Endeavor pilot, and Fedyaev, the Russian mission specialist, will also make their first spaceflights.
Fedyaev is the second Russian cosmonaut to fly to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket. NASA astronauts regularly fly to the station on Russian Soyuz craft.
Space travel has remained a rare place of cooperation between Moscow and Washington since the Russian offensive in Ukraine placed the two in sharp opposition.
Such exchanges have continued despite those tensions.
Bowen, a veteran of three space shuttle missions, said politics are rarely discussed in space.
“We are all professionals. We remain focused on the mission itself,” said the commander. “It’s always been a great relationship that we’ve had with cosmonauts once we’re in space.”
Aboard the ISS, Crew-6 members will conduct dozens of experiments, including studying how materials burn in microgravity and examining heart, brain and cartilage functions.
The current crew is the sixth to be transported to the ISS on a SpaceX rocket. The Endeavor capsule has flown into space three times.
NASA pays SpaceX about every six months to transport astronauts to the ISS.
The space agency expects Crew-6 to have a handover for several days with the four members of Crew-5, who have been aboard the ISS since October. Crew-5 then returns to Earth.
Rescue pod
Also aboard the ISS are cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio.
They were due to return home on March 28, but their Soyuz MS-22 capsule’s cooling system was damaged by a small meteoroid in December while docked with the ISS.
An unmanned Russian Soyuz capsule, MS-23, lifted off from Kazakhstan on Friday to carry the three astronauts home. They are now scheduled to return to Earth in September.
Construction of the ISS began in 1998 at a time of increased cooperation between the US and Russia following the Cold War space race.
Russia has been using the outdated but reliable Soyuz capsules to launch astronauts into space since the 1960s.
But in recent years, the Russian space program has been plagued by a laundry list of problems that have led to the loss of satellites and vehicles.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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