What to Know About Crew-4, NASA’s Next Space Station Mission

SpaceX is making ready to launch NASA’s Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station, the place the astronauts will spend the following six months operating a various choice of scientific experiments within the microgravity surroundings.

Crew-4 consists of NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Robert Hines, and Jessica Watkins, and likewise European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. Seated inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon, the crew will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch was beforehand scheduled for Saturday April 23, however climate delays have prevented the scheduled return of the Ax-1 mission, pushing the Crew-4 launch to no sooner than Tuesday April 26.

As the title suggests, Crew-4 is the fourth crew to launch as a part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Through this system, the area company has been counting on Elon Musk’s non-public area firm SpaceX to ship its astronauts to the area station and again. With the launch, Watkins will make historical past as the primary Black lady to embark on a longterm mission in area and the primary to dwell and work on the ISS.

Once they’re up there, members of Crew-4 will rendezvous with NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, and ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, who all launched to the ISS in November 2021 as a part of the company’s Crew-3 mission. Also on the orbital outpost are Russian cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, Sergey Korsakov, Anton Shkaplerov, and Pyotr Dubrov.

Crew-4 is packing a various scientific payload with analysis on enhancing astronaut well being, growing synthetic retinas, and rising crops with out soil. Their on-orbit work will additional the event of synthetic human retinas for restoring individuals’s imaginative and prescient, because the microgravity surroundings might enhance the standard and stability of the implants. The group will even use hydroponic (liquid-based) and aeroponic (air-based) methods to develop crops with out soil on the ISS, which might present a supply of vitamin for astronauts throughout long-duration area missions. A conveyable system referred to as rHealth will probably be used to watch the well being of the astronauts throughout their six-month stint on the ISS; the system makes use of lasers to kind and establish cells, analyze cell counts, and diagnose well being problems resembling blood cancers, according to NASA.

Before Crew-4 can launch, nevertheless, the group should await the departure of the primary all-private astronaut group to the ISS. Members of Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission arrived on the area station on April 9 and have been initially meant to spend eight days in low-Earth orbit (it’s now day 11 for the Ax-1 mission). The four-man crew was slated to depart the ISS on Tuesday, however unhealthy climate has extended their keep on the station till Saturday April 23 on the earliest.