The International Space Station will soon be back at full staff after SpaceX and NASA launched a four-person crew early Friday morning. The station has been operating well below the desired staffing level after Crew-11 had to come home early in January due to one astronaut’s undisclosed medical condition.
Crew-12 launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 5:17 a.m. ET on Friday and is expected to arrive at the ISS by Saturday afternoon. The launch comes after days of weather delays.
Understaffing at ISS and the new crew
The new crew — composed of NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev — will join three others already on board the station.
Their arrival will bring staffing back to seven, a number the station hasn’t seen since Crew-11 departed in January.
However, the numbers are still lower than normal during a transition period.
CNN reports departing crews typically stick around the station a short time after a new crew arrives for a debrief. During that process, as many as 11 astronauts may be on board at once.
However, with Crew-11’s abrupt departure, that won’t be the case with this mission. But Meir said she and her crewmates exchanged some information on the ground when Crew-11 returned.
“We ran into them several times and had a little bit of a debrief so they could pass along some pertinent things,” Meir said during a news conference this week.
Crew-12 will be on board the ISS for approximately eight months, conducting various research projects.
