SpaceX’s Crew-6 astronaut mission is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) early Friday morning (March 3), and you can watch the meetup live.Â
Crew-6’s Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) on Thursday (March 2) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
If all goes according to plan, Endeavour will catch up to the ISS on Friday at 1:17 a.m. EST (0617 GMT). You can watch the rendezvous live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the agency (opens in new tab).Â
Coverage is expected to begin at 11:30 p.m. EST on Thursday (0430 GMT on Friday). It will continue for a while, showing the opening of the hatches between the ISS and Endeavour around 2:55 a.m. EST (0755 GMT) and the welcome ceremony for the Crew-6 astronauts at 3:40 a.m. EST (0840 GMT) or so.Â
Related: Live updates about SpaceX’s Crew-6 mission for NASA
Endeavour is carrying a crew of four to the orbiting lab for a six-month mission — NASA astronauts Woody Hoburg and Stephen Bowen, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Sultan Al Neyadi and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
All are spaceflight rookies except Bowen, who’s the Crew-6 commander. Al Neyadi will become the first person from the UAE to spend a long-duration stint aboard the ISS.
Crew-6 will overlap, albeit briefly, with another SpaceX mission in orbit — Crew-5, which arrived at the ISS in early October. The Crew-5 quartet — NASA’s Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Koichi Wakata of Japan and cosmonaut Anna Kikina — are scheduled to return to Earth about five days after Crew-6 arrives.
The Crew-5 astronauts aren’t alone on the ISS at the moment. Also living on the orbiting lab are NASA’s Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, who arrived in September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The trio’s Soyuz sprang a coolant leak in mid-December, rendering it unfit to carry the spaceflyers home except in case of emergency. So Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, launched an uncrewed replacement Soyuz last month to be their ride back to Earth.
That ride will now occur in late September or so, meaning that Rubio, Propkopyev and Petelin will spend six more months on the ISS than originally planned.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Follow us @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab), or on Facebook (opens in new tab) and Instagram (opens in new tab).Â
