On the eve of the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission to the ISS, which was scheduled for early March, the crew was quarantined. Recently, the launch date of the Crew-8 mission was postponed by a week to allow Intuitive Machines to launch the lunar mission. Now NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, will spend two weeks in isolation at launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
This measure is necessary to ensure that the crew is healthy and will not bring any viruses to the space station that can infect other crew members. During the quarantine, the crew is allowed to see a limited number of family members and some other team members who have passed the inspection. But the astronauts will do most of the final preparations remotely during this period.
At a press conference last month, the crew members talked about how they prepared for the mission and what they expected from it. Mission commander Matthew Dominick spoke about the numerous experiments that the astronauts would work on, as well as about the various tasks they would perform, including becoming test subjects for research on the effects of space flights on the human body.
The launch is scheduled for March 1. Astronauts will be taken to the ISS by the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour reusable spacecraft, which has already participated in previous Crew-2 and Crew-6 missions, as well as in the first manned test flight Dragon Demo-2, which was conducted with the crew. Crew-8 will replace Crew-7 astronauts at the orbital outpost, who have been in orbit for six months.
Earlier, we reported on how the first private spacewalk was postponed due to the unavailability of spacesuits.
According to NASA
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