The four astronauts – three Americans including a woman, and a German – succeed the crew of which Thomas Pesquet was. They will carry out a six-month orbit mission.
Le Monde with AFP
There was no witness passage, but the succession arrived. The Spacex capsule carrying a new crew, Crew-3, was moored, Thursday, November 11, at the International Space Station (ISS), to replace Crew-2, which left Monday the ISS, of which was part of French. Thomas Pesquet. The four newly arrived members – three Americans including a woman, and a German – will do a six-month mission in orbit.
NASA’s astronauts, Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as the astronaut of the European Space Agency (ESA) Matthias Maurer had been launched from Florida by a Falcon 9 spacex rocket, Wednesday night , a take-off repelled several times, especially because of the weather.
For the American Tom Marshburn, it is the third stay in the space. He has already stolen aboard a space shuttle in 2009, then a Soyuz rocket in 2012-2013. The other three astronauts, including the leader of the Raja Chari Mission, on the other hand, made the trip for the first time. Matthias Maurer is the twelfth German to meet in orbit.
They were greeted by the American Mark Vande Hei, who celebrated on Wednesday his birthday, alone in the American segment of the station. Two Russian cosmonauts are also on board.
Many experiments
The mission is called CREW-3 because it is the third operational to the ISS provided by Spacex on behalf of NASA. But it is actually the fifth time the ELON MUSK company launches humans in orbit: before Crew-1 and Crew-2, a test mission (DEMO-2) had routed two astronauts to the ISS . And in September, Spacex also launched four tourists for three days in space, regardless of NASA.
The mission will include many experiences. One of them consists in growing plants in landless space or other culture medium, and another to build microgravity optical fibers that could be superior to those manufactured on Earth. Crew-3 astronauts will also perform outputs in space especially to continue installing new solar panels on the ISS.
Finally, they will welcome two tourist missions: Japanese brought by a Soyuz Russian spaceship at the end of the year, then in February 2022 of the Passengers of the Mission AX-1, organized by the company Axiom Space in partnership with Spacex.