by SpaceX’s Crew-6 astronaut mission is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) early Friday morning (March 3), and you can watch the encounter live.
Crew-6’s Dragon capsule, named Endeavor, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) Thursday (March 2) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
If all goes according to plan, Endeavor will catch up with the ISS on Friday at 1:17 a.m. EST (0617 GMT). You can watch the meeting live here on Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or live through the agency (opens in a new tab).
Coverage is expected to begin at 11:30 PM EST on Thursday (0430 GMT on Friday). It will continue for a while, showing the opening of the hatches between the ISS and Endeavor around 02:55 EST (0755 GMT) and the welcoming ceremony for the Crew-6 astronauts at 03:40 EST (0840 GMT) or so. .
Related: Live updates on SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission for NASA
Endeavor is carrying a crew of four to the orbiting laboratory for a six-month mission – NASA astronauts Woody Hoburg and Stephen Bowen, United Arab Emirates (UAE) Sultan Al Neyadi and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
All are new to spaceflight except Bowen, who is the commander of Crew-6. Al Neyadi will become the first person from the United Arab Emirates to spend a long-term stay aboard the ISS.
Crew-6 will overlap, albeit briefly, with another SpaceX mission in orbit – Crew-5, which arrived at the ISS in early October. The Crew-5 quartet — NASA’s Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Koichi Wakata of Japan and cosmonaut Anna Kikina — are scheduled to return to Earth about five days after Crew-6 arrives.
The Crew-5 astronauts are not alone on the ISS at the moment. Also living in the orbital laboratory are NASA’s Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, who arrived in September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The trio’s Soyuz developed a coolant leak in mid-December, rendering it unfit to carry the spacecraft home except in an emergency. So Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, launched an unmanned replacement Soyuz last month to be their ride back to Earth.
That trip will now take place in late September or so, meaning Rubio, Propkopyev and Petelin will spend six more months on the ISS than originally planned.
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 @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab)or on Facebook (opens in a new tab) and Instagram (opens in a new tab).
