A mission with a Russian, Emirati, and Americans that travels to space

Takeoff is scheduled from Kennedy Space Center at 01:45 local time (06:45 GMT).

According to the forecast, the weather conditions will be 95% favorable. The Dragon capsule the four passengers are traveling in should dock with the International Space Station after a trip of about one day.

Sultan Al Neyadi, 41, will become the fourth astronaut from an Arab country in history, and the first from his country to spend six months in space.

“We are ready physically, mentally and technically,” he told reporters when he arrived at the space center on Tuesday. “It’s a great honor to be here, it’s even a privilege,” he added.

The mission also includes the Russian cosmonaut, Andrei Fedyaev, at a time when tensions between Washington and Moscow are at an all-time high, a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It was already planned before the Moscow attack that the Russians would fly with SpaceX and the Americans with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, an exchange program that was maintained. The International Space Station is one of the last areas of cooperation between the two countries.

Asked about the impact of these political tensions on the crew, US mission commander Stephen Bowen said Tuesday that “it’s rare that these issues come up in daily conversations,” and that he and his colleagues remained “focused on the mission.”

Called “Crew-6,” it’s the sixth regular mission to fly to the International Space Station on a SpaceX ship.

The capsule that will transport them, called Endeavor, has already flown into space three times.

NASA contracts with the services of the American company to send its astronauts to the laboratory approximately every six months.

There they conduct scientific experiments and ensure maintenance of the station, which has been inhabited for more than 22 years.

Crew-6 will replace the four members of Crew-5 (two Americans, one Russian and one Japanese), who arrived in October 2022 and will return to Earth on their SpaceX ship.

There are also three other passengers on board the International Space Station (two Russians and one American) who arrived on board a Soyuz spacecraft.

The Russian missile was leaked in December. The Russian space agency Roscosmos sent a rescue vehicle that successfully docked with the International Space Station on Saturday.