by A SpaceX astronaut taxi has made it to the launch site ahead of this weekend’s scheduled liftoff.
The Dragon capsule Endeavor is now at Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the company announced via Twitter Sunday (opens in a new tab) (Feb. 19), in a post that included two images of the spacecraft.
Endeavor is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Pad 39A at 1:45 a.m. EST (0645 GMT) on February 27, launching the company’s Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. The launch was delayed one day from an earlier target of 26 February. You can watch the ride here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA.
Related: Meet the SpaceX Crew-6 astronauts
Crew-6 will send four astronauts to the ISS for a stay of approximately six months. Those crew members are NASA’s Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, the United Arab Emirates’ Sultan Al-Neyadi, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
Al-Neyadi will make history, becoming the first Arab astronaut ever to perform a long-duration mission aboard the orbital laboratory. (His compatriot Hazzaa Ali Almansoori visited the ISS in 2019, but spent only eight days outside Earth.)
Endeavor is scheduled to dock with the ISS early in the morning on February 29, approximately 24 hours after liftoff. The capsule will join another dragon in the orbital laboratory – the Endurance, which flies SpaceX’s Crew-5 mission for NASA.
The two SpaceX flights will not overlap in orbit for a long time. Endurance is scheduled to depart a few days after Endeavour’s arrival, carrying the Crew-5 astronauts – NASA’s Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata and Russian Anna Kikina – back to Earth.
Crew-6 will be the fourth astronaut mission to the ISS for Endeavour. The capsule also flew Demo-2 in 2020, SpaceX’s first crewed flight; Crew-2 in 2021; and Ax-1, the first all-private crewed mission to the orbital laboratory, in April 2022.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 7:00 PM ET to reflect NASA’s one-day delay of the SpaceX Crew-6 launch.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there (opens in a new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or on Facebook (opens in a new tab).
