SpaceX will launch the latest batch of astronauts to the International Space Station early Friday morning (Feb. 13), and you can watch the action live.
If all goes according to plan, Crew-12’s Crew Dragon capsule, named “Freedom,” will dock with the ISS on Saturday (Feb. 14) at about 3:15 p.m. EST (2015 GMT). You can watch that milestone here at Space.com as well when the time comes.
Crew-12 consists of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir (mission commander) and Jack Hathaway (pilot), Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency (mission specialist), and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev (mission specialist).
Adenot and Hathaway are both spaceflight rookies. Crew-12 will be the second spaceflight for both Meir and Fedyaev. The four astronauts will stay aboard the ISS for about nine months — about three months longer than the normal crew rotation.
Crew-12 will bring the ISS back up to its normal complement of seven crewmembers. The orbiting lab has been staffed with a skeleton crew of three — NASA’s Chris Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev — since mid-January, when SpaceX‘s Crew-11 mission came back to Earth.
That departure came about a month early, due to an undisclosed medical issue with one of the Crew-11 astronauts. It was the first medical evacuation in the long history of the ISS.
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