The second Iranian-American in space joins a completely international crew readying for launch Friday (Aug. 25).
The SpaceX Crew-7 mission will launch to the International Space Station no sooner than Friday (Aug. 25) at 3:50 a.m. EDT (0750 GMT) and you’ll be able to watch live here at Space.com, via a feed from NASA Television. The printed will begin at Thursday (Aug. 24) at 11:45 p.m. EDT (0345 GMT Friday, Aug. 25).
A backup launch opportunity is accessible at 3:27 a.m. (0727 GMT) on Saturday (Aug. 26) if weather or technical issues arise.
Crew-7 passed its flight readiness review with no major issues, NASA officials said in late-night update Thursday (Aug. 24). Weather conditions also look good for launch, with only a 15% probability of violating weather constraints, in keeping with Patrick Space Force Base, which manages the airspace within the region of the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
4 astronauts will head to space for Expeditions 69/70: NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, the second Iranian-American in space; European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa; and Konstantin Borisov of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos.
It has been nearly 20 years since any Iranian-American flew in space; the primary such person was space tourist Anousheh Ansari, who self-funded her own ISS mission in 2006.
“I believe it is vital,” Moghbeli told Space.com of her own milestone aboard Crew-7, in a pre-launch video interview on July 25 from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “I believe people really — especially younger people — after they can connect with someone, it makes them really consider they’ll do something as well.
“And so anytime we’re adding diversity to who’s flying in space,” Moghbeli added, “I believe we’re opening the door for future generations, for more people to consider they’ll do that as well.”
Moghbeli’s family, incidentally, celebrates each Christmas and Hannukah and people events will fall during her roughly 190 days in space. She plans a felt menorah for Hannukah. In July, she said was even mulling over the possibly of constructing latkes, potato pancakes traditionally eaten at Hannukah, while on the ISS.
Mogensen can be on his second mission in space after a 10-day Soyuz spacecraft mission on the ISS in 2016, which made him the primary Danish person in space. For the time being there was immense progress from SpaceX, which began flying operational industrial crew missions on behalf of NASA in 2020 while continuing to send cargo shipments on the uncrewed variant of Dragon since 2010.
NASA-funded missions by SpaceX carry astronauts to the ISS onboard the fully reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft and the partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, whose first stage rockets come back to Earth on their very own to the touch down on a drone ship or on land.
“SpaceX, what they’ve achieved within the last 10 or so years has been remarkable. And dealing with them has been a pleasure,” Mogensen said in one other prelaunch interview July 25 with Space.com. “They’ve come an incredibly good distance, and it’s really a pleasure to see how much they’ve achieved and the way much really they’ve modified human spaceflight, on the subject of reusability.”
Furukawa, who also went to space in 2016 for Expeditions 28 and 29, said he knows already what he can be missing on Earth. “I actually missed having a walk within the green forests because onboard the space station, I actually miss a green colours,” he said in one other prelaunch interview July 25.
From space, he said, the astronauts can see the blue Earth, or the brown desert, but green is a bit harder to identify. Furukawa then turned to technology to fill the gap: “I attempted to observe video of forest, and it was a weird feeling,” he said. “I actually miss green color far more than I expected.”
Borisov, on his first flight, said among the many 2.5 hours of exercise astronauts perform each day he hopes to integrate his beloved yoga within the routine. But the best way to do it without gravity can be difficult: “I do know what to do with respiratory,” he said on July 25, referring to a typical tool yogis use to carry stretches or difficult poses.
But in weightlessness, he can have to forge his own path as few other astronauts have tried yoga apart from ESA’s Samantha Cristoforetti. Nor would a typical video filmed with Earth’s gravity, he added, function a helpful guide absent that force.