Days after the SpaceX Dragon capsule carried by wealthy adventurers splashed off the coast of Florida; another capsule is set to launch Wednesday, this time on a NASA mission to the International Space Station. As the weather improves, the Crew-4 mission will launch from the Kennedy Space Centre at 3:52 am (0752 GMT), carrying Americans Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, Jessica Watkins, and Italians from the European space agency Cristoforetti Samantha. The event will be broadcast live on NASA’s website and social media.

SpaceX’s quick turnaround time of fewer than 40 hours between recovering one crew member and dispatching another shows how Elon Musk’s company became a national aerospace company in 2020.

From the end of the space shuttle program in 2011 until 2020, NASA relied on Russian Soyuz rockets for service.
“Think about how the Cape has transformed, and think about all those abandoned launch pads on the Cape and how they’ve come back to life,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a news conference.

Crew-4 will join the Crew-3 quartet, whose five-month rotation on the ISS is ending, and the three Russians will work on the Russian portion of the orbital outpost. The return date for Crew-3 will be determined shortly. Crew-4 will conduct hundreds of scientific experiments, including ongoing research into growing soilless plants in space.

Another involves developing an artificial human retina that uses the microgravity environment of the International Space Station to help deposit layer after layer of protein membranes. NASA scientist Heidi Paris said the technology “could eventually be used to replace damaged photoreceptor cells in the eye and potentially restore meaningful vision to millions of people with retinal degenerative diseases.”

Among the crew, Watkins will become the fifth black woman to go into space and the first to join the crew of the International Space Station on an extended mission. The crew should arrive at the space lab 17 hours after launch, with docking scheduled for 8.15 pm on Wednesday (0015 GMT on Thursday).