A little while ago, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in its Crew-7 or SpaceX Crew-7 mission. After almost exactly twelve minutes, it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and went en route to carry out its mission. This is the 7th crewed mission of the Crew Dragon spacecraft within the normal rotation of the International Space Station crew. This is also the third mission for the Endurance. The launch takes place a day late because it took longer than expected to check the status of some valves of the life support system carried out after some of those of another Crew Dragon started corroding.
The four new members of the International Space Station crew, who are added to the Expedition 69 crew, are:
Jasmine Moghbeli. Born on June 24, 1983, in Bad Nauheim, in the then West Germany, to a family from Tehran who fled after the Islamic revolution, she earned a degree in aerospace engineering and computer information from MIT and became an officer in the US Marine Corps receiving training as a helicopter pilot. She earned a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and graduated as a test pilot. She was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in 2017. She’s on her first space mission.
Andreas Enevold Mogensen. Born on November 2, 1976, in Copenhagen, Denmark, he earned various international degrees: a Master of Engineering in aeronautical engineering at Imperial College, London, in 1999, a summa cum laude at Ecole Faire in 2004 and a Ph.D in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, in 2007. In 2014 he was an aquanaut in the underwater NEEMO 19 mission. He already served on the International Space Station in the space mission called iriss between September 2 and 11, 2015. This new mission is called huginn. He’s the first European astronaut acting as a Crew Dragon pilot.
Satoshi Furukawa. Born on April 4, 1964, in Yokohama, Japan, he received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Tokyo in 1989 and then worked as a doctor and surgeon for several years. In 1999, he was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASDA, the then Japanese space agency. He previously served on the International Space Station between June and November 2011 as part of Expedition 28/29.
Konstantin Sergeyevich Borisov. Born on 14 August 1984, in Smolensk, in the then USSR, he earned a degree in economics in 2007 from the Russian Academy of Economics and a master’s degree in operations research and systems analysis from the British University of Warwick in Coventry. He was selected as a cosmonaut candidate in 2018. He’s on his first space mission.
On Sunday, at around 12.50 UTC, the Crew Dragon Endurance will reach the International Space Station and will dock directly with the Harmony module. Despite the problems between the USA and Russia, a cosmonaut is traveling on the Crew Dragon for the second straight mission, and that’s good.
