We’ll have a wait a bit longer to see the subsequent non-public astronaut mission to the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) carry off.
NASA introduced on Wednesday (Might 14) that the goal launch date for Ax-4, the fourth crewed flight to the ISS by Houston-based firm Axiom Area, has been pushed from Might 29 to June 8.
The delay is a part of a collection of ISS schedule changes, which can “present extra time to finalize mission plans, spacecraft readiness and logistics,” company officers wrote in an update on Wednesday.
Ax-4 will carry off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Area Middle in Florida, carrying 4 folks to the orbiting lab aboard a Dragon spacecraft.
That quartet shall be led by record-setting former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who at present serves as Axiom’s director of human spaceflight. Becoming a member of her are pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India, Polish mission specialist Sławosz Uznański of the European Area Company and mission specialist Tibor Kapu of Hungary.
Ax-4 will mark the primary time that anybody from these latter three international locations lives aboard the ISS. The spaceflyers will conduct almost 60 science investigations in the course of the mission, which is predicted to stay docked on the orbiting lab for about two weeks.
Two different ISS missions, each of them SpaceX flights, are affected by the newly introduced rescheduling.
SpaceX’s Crew-11 astronaut mission for NASA is now slated to launch no sooner than late July (reasonably than merely “July”), and the corporate’s CRS-33 cargo flight is focusing on a late August liftoff.
