Four new crew members are on their way to the International Space Station after launching into orbit early Friday morning.
They will arrive at an unusually quiet orbiting lab.
NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev were originally going to overlap in space with the outgoing crew, a mission known as Crew-11. But that group had to return to Earth early because of a medical issue. (NASA did not disclose the identity of the affected astronaut or the nature of the incident for privacy reasons.)
The Crew-11 astronauts departed on Jan. 14, leaving a sole NASA astronaut, Chris Williams, onboard the International Space Station, along with two Russian cosmonauts.
The four new arrivals, together known as Crew-12, will bring the space station up to its standard occupancy of seven people. Their SpaceX capsule is expected to dock Saturday around 3:15 p.m. ET.
The crew lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 5:15 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
High winds earlier this week along the flight path caused NASA to push the launch back two days. The agency routinely monitors weather conditions along the rocket’s path, in case an emergency on ascent requires the Dragon capsule carrying the astronauts to separate from the rocket and land along the East Coast.
A recent Falcon 9 mishap, during an uncrewed SpaceX mission to deploy a batch of the company’s Starlink satellites, also led NASA officials to review findings from the company before giving the go for launch.
The Feb. 2 incident prompted SpaceX to briefly pause launches while it and the Federal Aviation Administration investigated the problem. Several days later, the FAA cleared SpaceX to resume operations, and a subsequent launch successfully deployed Starlink satellites, with the rocket performing as expected.
In the time the space station has been understaffed, no major issues have cropped up, NASA officials said in a news briefing earlier this week. As such, there was no urgent need to rush the new crew’s arrival.
“We’re looking forward to some extra helping hands, but we’ll launch when we’re ready,” Dina Contella, deputy manager of NASA’s International Space Station Program at the Johnson Space Center, said Monday.
The Crew-12 mission is the second spaceflight for Meir and Fedyaev, and the first for Hathaway and Adenot. Meir previously spent 205 days on the space station, starting in July 2019. During that time, she and fellow NASA astronaut Christina Koch made history by performing the agency’s first all-female spacewalks. Koch is one of the crew members on NASA’s Artemis II mission, which is expected to send four astronauts on a flight around the moon. They could launch as early as March 6.
The four new space station crew members are slated to remain at the orbiting outpost for around eight months. During that time, they will conduct science experiments, including research on food production in space, how microgravity affects blood flow in the body, medical investigations on pneumonia-causing bacteria and other studies that NASA says will “advance research and technology for future moon and Mars missions and benefit humanity back on Earth.”