Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.
Two Americans, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut said Sunday they are eager to blast off Wednesday on a flight to the International Space Station, replacing four crew members who cut their mission short and returned to Earth last month because of a medical issue.
Crew 12 commander Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev are scheduled for launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:01 a.m. EST Wednesday. If all goes well, they'll catch up with the lab Thursday, moving in for docking at 10:30 a.m.
The flight had been on hold until later this month, after NASA's Artemis II moon mission launched and returned to Earth. But the moonshot was delayed to March because of a hydrogen leak in its Space Launch System rocket, clearing the way for NASA to move up the Falcon 9 space station flight.
Meir and her crewmates flew to the Kennedy Space Center from Houston on Friday. Their Falcon 9 rocket was erected at the nearby Space Force Station early Saturday, and SpaceX test fired its first stage engines before dawn Sunday to set the stage for launch.
"We arrived a couple of days ago, and this is really starting to feel like we're about to launch," Meir said during a virtual news conference at the Kennedy Space Center, where the crew is in pre-flight medical quarantine. "You know, we've seen the rocket. We've been spending time out on the beach with our families. We've been thinking about all the things, last minute, things that we need to take care of. So it's getting very, very real."
In a post on the social media platform X, she shared a short video of herself and her three-year-old daughter playing with an air-propelled toy rocket on the beach.
"We had some very welcome family time on the beach in the Florida sunshine," she said on X. "My daughter's rocketry skills are on point! Let's light this rocket!"
Since the early departure of the four Crew 11 fliers whom Meir and her crew are replacing, the station has been staffed by a reduced crew of three: commander Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, fellow cosmonaut Sergey Mikaev, and NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who were launched to the outpost last November aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Meir and company will boost the station crew back to seven long-duration occupants, giving Williams help in maintaining systems in the U.S. segment of the lab. They'll also be able to resume a full slate of experiments and regain the ability for two-person NASA spacewalks, emergency or otherwise, which rely on the buddy system for safety.
Crew 11 commander Zena Cardman, copilot Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov originally planned to return to Earth around Feb. 20, after a five-day "handover" with their Crew 12 replacements.
But NASA ordered Cardman and company back to Earth on Jan. 15, after one of the Crew 11 fliers experienced an undisclosed medical issue. Crew 11 came down safely, and all four crew members appeared healthy and in good spirits at a post-flight news conference.
Meir said that while Crew 12 did not get a crew-to-crew in-space handover from Crew 11, they are more than ready to move into the outpost and get to work. Meir and Fedyaev have each logged a long-duration stay aboard the station while Hathaway, a former F/A-18E carrier pilot, and Adenot, a French air force helicopter test pilot, are making their first space flight.
"Chris has been up there since around the time of Thanksgiving, so he is very well settled in. We have talked to him as a crew," Meir said. "We've talked to him individually several times. He's doing really well and has that place running. It's going to be in perfect shape when we get up there."
She said her crew had also met with Crew 11 "and had a little bit of a debrief so they could pass along some pertinent things. There are some differences on the space station from the time that Andrey and I flew before, but overall, as a whole, it hasn't changed that much."