NASA, SpaceX Delay Flight To International Space Station Due To Bad Weather

A delay related to “a major storm system”. NASA and SpaceX have postponed to November 3 the takeoff of the rocket that was to send four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), the US agency announced on Saturday, October 30. The crew of the Crew-3 mission was to take off on Sunday aboard the Crew Dragon capsule, named Endurance and attached to a Falcon 9 rocket, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida (United States).

The launch will finally take place on Wednesday at 1:10 a.m. local time, and “Crew-3 will arrive at the space station that same evening at approximately 11 p.m.”, NASA said. They will then proceed to “a brief handover with the astronauts who flew to the station as part of the mission of the agency called SpaceX Crew-2”, including Frenchman Thomas Pesquet. If the launch turns out to be impossible again on Wednesday, there is “a possibility of relief” the next day, SpaceX said.

Crew-3, the third regular manned mission provided by SpaceX on behalf of NASA, is part of the multi-billion dollar contract signed between Elon Musk’s company and the US agency. The Crew-3 crew will spend six months in orbit and conduct research aimed at facilitating future distant space exploration, or bringing useful knowledge to life on Earth.

The astronauts will also carry out spacewalks to complete the renovation of the solar panels of the ISS. They will host two tourist missions in parallel: Japanese people brought in by a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, then passengers from the Space-X Axiom mission.