Miami, US, Feb 13 (EFE).-
NASA and SpaceX successfully launched the Crew-12 relief mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday to replace the team that returned to Earth approximately a month earlier than planned due to a medical emergency affecting one of its members.
The launch proceeded smoothly from the Space Force Station at Cape Canaveral at 5:15 am, after two delays this week caused by adverse weather conditions.
The mission is traveling aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule with a crew comprised of Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Russian Andrey Fedyaev, and Sophie Adenot, the second French woman to travel to space.
NASA said that the spacecraft was scheduled to dock with the ISS in about 34 hours, at 3:15 pm on Saturday.
Crew-12 will have an estimated duration of nine months, longer than the usual six months of the NASA-SpaceX joint commercial crew program.
The four crew members will replace Crew-11—composed of Americans Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Russian astronaut Oleg Platonov—who returned to Earth on Jan. 14 in what became the first medical evacuation in the history of the ISS, after a health problem was detected in one of its members.
NASA has not released the identity of the affected individual citing medical privacy.
Since then, the station has operated with a reduced crew consisting of American astronaut Christopher Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, who have maintained ongoing operations and scientific experiments.
Since 2020, the NASA-SpaceX partnership has been key to ensuring continuous access to the ISS for both crew and cargo, NASA noted during the broadcast.
The first mission of that commercial agreement, Demo-2, launched in May 2020, marked the rebirth of crewed spaceflight from American soil and ended the reliance on Russian spacecraft.
Since then, a total of 13 crews have launched to the orbiting laboratory, including Friday’s crew. EFE
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