NASA is just hours away from its first crewed launch of 2026, and its first since Crew-11 flew to orbit in August last year.
Just ahead of Crew-12’s liftoff, the space agency has released a short trailer (above) for the mission, which will send four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew will travel aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule carried to orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, are expected to blast off from from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral in Florida at 5:15 a.m. ET on Friday, February 13. If you’re interested in watching a livestream of the event, Digital Trends has all the information you need.
The mission team had been hoping to launch early on Wednesday, but poor weather conditions in the ascent corridor prompted it to push the launch to Thursday. But then another forecast pushed it to Friday. Thankfully, everything is looking good for the launch in just a few hours from now.
“Weather forecasters issued an improved outlook for the launch site conditions, with a 90% chance of acceptable weather at launch time,” NASA said in a post on its website. The team will assess a final forecast at around 10 p.m. ET, a few hours before the crew suits up. Be sure to check NASA’s X account for any last-minute changes to the schedule.
The crew will spend eight months aboard the orbital outpost performing research, technology demonstrations, and maintenance activities, some 250 miles above Earth.
“We do research on the International Space Station because it provides a very unique and novel environment that we cannot replicate here on Earth,” Jessica Meir, on her second mission to the ISS, says in NASA’s trailer. “We’ll be doing a wealth of scientific experiments, ranging from physiology and medical experiments to radiation material science experiments, deploying small satellites, you name it. Really, every aspect of science is represented in the work that we do on the International Space Station.”
Jack Hathaway adds that it’s “important to push the boundaries of what’s possible — if we’re just satisfied with what we have, we’re never going to create the technology to make our lives better.”
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.