NASA officials announced that the next International Space Station crew will not lift off before late February due to a moon mission clearing the same launch pad. Crew-8 is scheduled to lift off a quartet of astronauts aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida for a half-year International Space Station (ISS) rotation. The crew will consist of NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick (commander), Michael Barratt (pilot), and Jeanette Epps (mission specialist), along with mission specialist Alexander Grebenkin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
Steve Stich, the manager of the commercial crew program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, stated at a briefing livestreamed on NASA Television that they are looking at a late February timeline for the launch. This timing will allow for Intuitive Machines’ first moon lander, carrying NASA and other payloads, to leave Earth via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Pad 39A before Crew-8.
Crew-8, representing the eighth operational astronaut mission that SpaceX will fly to the ISS for NASA, significantly depends on the status of the private moon mission called IM-1. If IM-1 departs on time, Crew-8 is expected to launch around February 29 or March 1. However, if IM-1 misses its narrow monthly window for a moon landing, Crew-8 will remain grounded until at least March 22.
While three of the Crew-8 astronauts are on their first mission, Barratt is embarking on his third trip following flights in 2009 and 2011. The new crew will relieve the SpaceX Crew-7 astronauts currently on the ISS, along with the other Expedition 70 astronauts who launched on Russia’s Soyuz MS-24 mission on September 15.
The return of Crew-8 is expected no sooner than August 2024, and they will head home after SpaceX’s Crew-9 flight arrives at the ISS for Expeditions 71/72.
Epps will be the second Black woman to serve on an ISS long-duration mission, following Jessica Watkins in 2022. Epps will also be involved in the first Starliner mission with astronauts, called Crewed Flight Test (CFT), to the orbital lab in mid-April or thereabouts. Crew-8’s launch will follow the return of the private crew Ax-3, which launched on January 18 for a two-week mission at the ISS with SpaceX.
