So far NASACrew-4 missions in International Space Station finally, on April 27, after several delays, their predecessors from the Crew-3 mission have a return date to Earth.
У post to Twitter On Monday morning, NASA space chief Katie Luders said the space agency was working to get Crew-3 astronauts to dock off the ISS on their Crew Dragon spacecraft around the evening of EDT on Wednesday, May 4, after Florida coast 5 May.
However, this schedule assumes the preservation of the weather. The The launch of Crew-4 has been postponed because the crew of Axiom-1, the first completely private mission to the ISS, was unable to return from the space station as planned due to severe weather off the coast of Florida.
Crew 3 – NASA astronauts Raja Chary, Tom Marshburn and Kyle Barron, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer – have been on the ISS since November. With the arrival of fellow cosmonaut from ESA Samantha Christophoretta in Crew-4, ESA now has two astronauts aboard the ISS for for the first time since 2011.
Crew-3 and Crew-4 are the third and fourth missions under NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which contracts with private space companies to transport astronauts to and from the space station. All four missions have so far been performed on the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, launched by SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets.
But if a crucial orbital test flight May 19 will go well, future crew missions may also fly on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.
Four members of the Crew-4 mission, NASA astronauts Kiel Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins, along with Christopher will spend about six months aboard the ISS and return to Earth sometime in the fall of 2022.
