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SpaceX Dragon Spacecraft Prepares For February 27 Flight
Sultan Al-Neyadi from the United Arab Emirates will join Crew-6 astronauts to travel to the International Space Station for a six month mission.
The SpaceX Dragon astronaut shuttle Endeavour has been positioned at launch pad 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as engineers prepare for this weekend’s scheduled flight to the International Space Station (ISS).
Crew-6 Dragon arrives at LC-39A ahead of flight pic.twitter.com/QhAKqPFl6t
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 19, 2023
At 1:45 AM EDT (06:45 GMT) on February 27th, Endeavour will blast off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to commence the Crew-6 mission. Crew-6 is a team of four astronauts who will travel to the International Space Station for around 6 months and is composed of Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, US astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg from NASA, and UAE’s astronaut Sultan Al-Neyadi.
When Al-Neyadi’s trip to the ISS is complete, he’ll become the first Arab astronaut to complete an extended stay at the station, beating Hazzaa Ali Almansoori’s 2019 eight-day mission.
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Endeavour will dock with the ISS on the morning of February 29th. After that, another Dragon spacecraft will return to earth with outgoing NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japan’s Koichi Wakata, and Russia’s Anna Kikinapa.
The Crew-6 mission will be the Endeavour spacecraft’s fourth trip to the ISS. SpaceX’s first crewed trip took place in 2020, followed by Crew-2 in 2021 and Ax-1 in April 2022, the first privately crewed journey to the ISS.