Photo: MALCOLM DENEMARK/FLORIDA TODAY/AP PHOTO/PICTURE ALLIANCE / Deutsche Welle
Less than two days after a SpaceX Dragon capsule manned by wealthy adventurers splashed down off the coast of Florida, another mission took off this Wednesday (27.04.2022), this time for a NASA mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
The crew, which will take about 16 hours to arrive at the space laboratory, is made up of Kjell Lindgren (commander), Robert Hines and Jessica Watkins, from the US space agency NASA, and astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, from the European Space Agency (ESA) .
The night launch (3: 53 local time) was carried out from platform 39A of the Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Center .
The Crew 4 (Crew-4) will join the quartet of l Crew 3, which is nearing the end of its five-month rotation on the ISS, as well as three Russians on the Russian segment of the orbital outpost. In the docking maneuver to the space station, the astronauts of Crew 4 will receive the help of the members of Crew 3, who arrived at the space laboratory last 11 of November, and that in the next few days it will undertake a trip back to Earth.
More than 80 scientific and technical experiments
The Crew 4 astronauts, who travel with two small stuffed animals, a turtle and a monkey, will spend about six months on the space station. They will conduct research in areas such as materials science, health technologies, and plant science, with the goal of preparing for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and benefiting life on Earth.
They will develop more than 606 scientific and technical experiments, including ongoing research on growing plants without soil in space, plus up to two spacewalks to replace solar panels on the aging orbital station.
Another experiment of the expedition 67 to the space station will consist of developing an artificial human retina, taking advantage of the environment ISS microgravity to help deposit thin films of proteins, layer after layer. This technology “could eventually be used to replace damaged photoreceptor cells in the eyes and potentially restore meaningful vision to the millions of people who suffer from degenerative retinal diseases,” said NASA scientist Heidi Parris.
When Dragon Freedom arrives at the space station, it will dock with the Harmony module, which until this Saturday was occupied by the Dragon Endeavour, in which it traveled to this laboratory the first private mission to reach that destination, the Ax-1, organized by the company Axiom Space of Texas.
SpaceX, NASA’s main astronaut taxi
Crew 4 is one of the astronaut transport missions to the space station carried out by the private company SpaceX for NASA since 2020, when the first flight was made from United States territory to the ISS since end of transhipment program Spacers in 2020.
SpaceX’s fast response time (just under 40 hours between recovering one crew and sending another) is a sign of an increasingly crowded manned spaceflight schedule since tycoon Elon Musk’s company became the NASA’s main astronaut taxi in 2020.
Between 1200 and 2020, NASA relied on Russian Soyuz rockets to that service. “Think about how the Cape has been transformed, think about all those abandoned launch pads on the Cape and how they’re coming back to life,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters on Tuesday.
rml (efe, afp)