Thomas Pesquet’s return to Earth delayed by days – The HuffPost

JOE SKIPPER / Reuters

SPACE – A little ISS update for Thomas Pesquet. NASA and SpaceX have postponed from Sunday October 31 to Wednesday November 3 the takeoff of the rocket that was to send four new astronauts to the International space station (and therefore replace French and his colleagues) in order to avoid “a major storm system,” the US agency said on Saturday.

The crew of this “Crew-3” mission was to take off on Sunday aboard the capsule. Crew Dragon called “Endurance”, fixed on a Falcon 9 rocket, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The launch will finally take place on Wednesday at 1:10 a.m. local time (or 6:10 a.m. in France), and “Crew-3 will arrive at the space station the same evening at around 11 p.m. (i.e. 4 a.m. in Paris on the night of Wednesday to Thursday. ) ”, NASA said.

They will then proceed to “a brief handover with the astronauts who had flown to the station as part of the mission of the agency called SpaceX Crew-2”, including the French Thomas Pesquet, which have been in the ISS since April, she added.

Two sightseeing tours on the program for new astronauts

If the launch turns out to be impossible again on Wednesday, there is “a possibility of relief” on Thursday, November 4, SpaceX said on its website. Crew-3, SpaceX’s third regular manned mission on behalf of NASA, is part of the multi-billion dollar contract signed with Elon Musk’s private company by the US agency after ending its own space shuttle program in 2011.

The Crew-3 crew will spend six months in orbit and conduct research aimed at facilitating future distant space explorations or bringing useful knowledge to life on Earth.

The mission includes an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth substrate. Another aims to manufacture optical fibers in microgravity, which, according to research already carried out, could give them a higher quality than those produced in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Crew-3 astronauts will also conduct spacewalks to complete the refurbishment of the ISS’s solar panels and host two tourist missions: Japanese brought by a Russian Soyuz spacecraft at the end of the year, then passengers from the Space-X Axiom mission, scheduled for February 2022.

See also on the HuffPost: Thomas Pesquet commander of the ISS: the new powers of the head of the station