Credit...Steve Nesius/Reuters
Astronauts Head to Space Station as Clouds Stay Just Far Enough Away
After a scrubbed launch on Thursday, four astronauts lifted off from Florida and will dock at the International Space Station on Saturday.
by https://www.nytimes.com/by/kenneth-chang · NY TimesSpaceX’s latest mission for NASA launched four astronauts toward the International Space Station on Friday.
An initial launch attempt on Thursday was thwarted in the last minute of the countdown by a threatening cloud above the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
On Friday, a U-shape formation of clouds encroached but stayed just far enough away for the launch to proceed.
“We got very lucky today, I would say,” Steve Stich, the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said during a postlaunch news conference.
The mission is known as Crew-11, because it is the 11th time that SpaceX, the rocket company run by Elon Musk, has taken astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the usual rotation of crew members living and working in orbit.
Aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft are Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke of NASA, Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia.
“You could see they were very excited on the way uphill, and they’re doing well on orbit,” Mr. Stich said.
Because of how the orbital trajectories lined up, the docking time at the space station remains the same — Saturday at 3 a.m. Eastern time, even though the astronauts left Earth almost 24 hours later than planned.
By coincidence, the day of docking coincides with the fifth anniversary of the splashdown of the first Crew Dragon mission with astronauts aboard. On Aug. 2, 2020, two NASA astronauts, Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, returned to Earth after spending two months on the space station.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft that was launched on Friday was the same one used for that first flight. Mr. Behnken and Mr. Hurley named this particular vehicle Endeavour, and since then, Endeavour has made four more round trips to the space station for NASA.
The Crew-11 mission is the sixth trip to space for Endeavour.
“While we’re on fun facts about this Dragon spacecraft, it’s also a spacecraft that holds the record for the most time in orbit by any American spacecraft,” said Sarah Walker, director of Dragon mission management at SpaceX.
Endeavour holds the record for the longest single mission — 235 days in orbit during Crew-8 — and the cumulative record, “which is 700 days and counting,” Ms. Walker said.
The Crew-11 astronauts are scheduled to stay at the space station for six months. By then, Endeavour will be approaching a total of 1,000 days in space.
Once Crew-11 arrives, preparations for the departure of the four Crew-10 astronauts, who have been at the space station since March, will begin. They are expected to return to Earth next week.
During the launch attempt on Thursday, Sean Duffy, the acting NASA administrator, met with Dmitry Bakanov, the director general of Roscosmos, the state corporation that oversees Russia’s space program.
The Russian news agency TASS was the first to report on the meeting, which NASA later confirmed.
At the Friday news conference, Kenneth Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, said he would not discuss details of Mr. Duffy’s and Mr. Bakanov’s conversation, but said the meeting was positive.
“The two of them, I thought, had a great connection,” Mr. Bowersox said. “And I think they started the very beginning of what can be a good relationship.”
That was the first face-to-face meeting between a NASA administrator and a head of Roscosmos since 2018.