Takeoff was scheduled for 1:45 am (3:45 am Brasília time) at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida (southeast United States), with a multicultural crew, Crew6, the sixth to travel to the ISS in a regular rotation mission carried out by SpaceX.
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The capsule with the crew, made up of two American astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was supposed to dock with the ISS after a one-day trip.
But two minutes before liftoff, the Crew6 mission was delayed by a problem with ground systems, NASA said on Twitter.
SpaceX announced shortly after that it had begun removing fuel from the rocket and that the crew would leave the capsule.
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“The next available launch attempt will take place at 0:34 (2:34 GMT) on Thursday, March 2, but depends on a resolution of the technical problem that prevented the launch this Monday,” said SpaceX.
Originally scheduled for Sunday, the takeoff had already been postponed by NASA for 24 hours.
Americans Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russian Andrei Fediayev and UAE astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi are expected to spend six months on the ISS.
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Sultan Al Neyadi, 41, will be the fourth astronaut from an Arab country in history and the first from his country to spend six months in space. His compatriot Hazzaa Al Mansoori joined an eight-day mission in 2019.
“We are prepared physically, mentally and technically,” he told the press last week. “It is a great honor to be here, and even a privilege”, added Neyadi.
The mission also includes Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fediayev, at a time of great tension between Washington and Moscow, a year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
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It was already planned before the Moscow offensive that the Russians would travel with SpaceX and the Americans with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, an exchange program that was maintained. The ISS is one of the last fields of cooperation between the two countries.
NASA contracts the services of the American company SpaceX to send its astronauts approximately every six months to the ISS.
The place hosts scientific experiments and the astronauts are responsible for maintaining the ISS, which has had a crew for over 22 years.
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Crew-6 will replace the four members of Crew-5 (two Americans, one Russian and one Japanese), who arrived at the ISS in October 2022 and will return to Earth aboard their own SpaceX spacecraft.
The ISS also has three other astronauts (two Russians and one American), who arrived at the station in a Soyuz spacecraft.
The Russian rocket suffered a leak in December. The country's space agency, Roscosmos, sent a rescue ship, which docked with the ISS on Saturday.
(With AFP)
