SpaceX and NASA launch new crew to Space Station after medical evacuation in mid-January

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - CAPE CANAVERAL — A SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts soared into orbit from Florida early Friday on its way to the International Space Station for an eight-month science mission in microgravity.

The two-stage Falcon 9, topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule dubbed "Freedom", lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, along Florida's Atlantic Coast, at about 5:15 a.m. EST (1015 GMT).

A live NASA-SpaceX webcast showed the 25-story-tall vehicle rising from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life, gulping 700,000 gallons of fuel per second, emitting clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lit up the predawn sky.

The mission named Crew-12 is led by Jessica Meir, 48, a veteran astronaut and marine biologist on her second trip to the space station, nearly seven years after making history with NASA colleague Christina Koch by completing history's first all-female spacewalk.

Joining her on the flight was Jack Hathaway, 43, a former US Navy fighter pilot and rookie astronaut; European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, 43, a master helicopter pilot from France; and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, a former military pilot on his second mission to the ISS.

Upon arrival, the team will get busy with a host of scientific, medical and technical research tasks in microgravity, according to NASA.

Those include studies of pneumonia-causing bacteria to improve treatments on Earth, and experiments with plant and nitrogen-fixing microbe interactions to boost food production in space.

Much of the science agenda is aimed at perfecting technologies that NASA hopes to deploy in future astronaut missions to the moon and Mars as part of its fledgling Artemis program, successor to project Apollo a half-century ago.

NASA, which contracts SpaceX for the astronauts’ transport to and from the space station, had sought to expedite the Crew-12 launch — originally slated for takeoff on February 15 — due to the staffing situation. But the agency had to forgo two possible launch windows on Wednesday and Thursday because of unfavorable weather along the rocket’s flight path.

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The International Space Station has been operating with three people on board — well below the seven-person staff the space agency desires — since mid-January.

The new launch comes after a previous SpaceX staffing mission, Crew-11, was forced to make an early return to Earth because of an undisclosed medical issue by an unidentified member.

“I’ll say it again, that this mission has shown, in many ways, what it means to be mission focused at NASA,” space agency chief Jared Isaacman said Friday.

“Just to recap, in the last couple of weeks, we brought Crew-11 home early. We pulled forward Crew-12 to today — all while simultaneously making preparations for the Artemis II mission,” he added, referring to NASA’s upcoming moon mission that’s slated to take off as soon as March.

The Crew-11 astronauts’ premature departure left the football field-size space station with three remaining staff members: two Russian cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, as well as NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who traveled to the orbiting laboratory as part of a rideshare agreement with Roscosmos, NASA’s Russian counterpart.

The situation is less than ideal. NASA has routinely indicated that a robust crew presence on the space station is crucial for maximizing value and productivity on board the orbiting laboratory — which costs about $3 billion per year to operate and maintain.

However, as Meir noted, before SpaceX began offering NASA routine trips to orbit for the space agency’s astronauts, it was common for only three astronauts to helm the space station. — Agencies