Elon Musk's space company SpaceX canceled its Crew 6 mission at the last minute due to a problem with the ground systems. Now the rest of the current ISS crew has to wait for the replacement.
Elon Musk's SpaceX has delayed the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station. The Crew 6 mission was canceled two minutes before the scheduled launch because of a problem with the ground systems, the US space agency NASA said on Twitter. A new start date has not yet been announced.
The carrier rocket should start at the Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida and bring two US astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates into space with a Dragon space capsule.
NASA's Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russia's Andrei Fedyaev and Emirates' Sultan al-Nejadi are scheduled to spend six months on the ISS. 41-year-old al-Nejadi is the fourth astronaut from an Arab country and the second astronaut from the Emirates to go into space. In 2019, his compatriot Hassa al-Mansuri spent eight days on the ISS.
Crew 6 is to replace Crew 5 on the ISS after a handover lasting several days. Russian Anna Kikina, US astronaut Nicole Mann and her compatriot Josh Cassada, and Japan's Koichi Wakata also arrived at the ISS aboard a Dragon spacecraft in October and are now scheduled to return to Earth.
The US astronaut Frank Rubio and the Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopjew and Dmitri Petelin are also currently on the ISS. They were originally scheduled to fly back to Earth in the Russian MS-22 Soyuz capsule at the end of March. However, the capsule docked with the ISS was apparently damaged by a small meteorite in mid-December, causing a leak in the spacecraft's cooling system.
The mission of the three astronauts was extended by six months because of the breakdown. On Sunday, the unmanned Soyuz MS-23 reached the ISS, which was launched on Friday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It is supposed to bring the three astronauts stuck on the space station back to earth in September.
