Second Time's a Charm for Zena Cardman as She Heads to the Space Station
Ms. Cardman is scheduled to finally reach orbit on Thursday, when the next group of astronauts heads to the International Space Station, part of the usual rotation of crew. She is the commander of the Crew-11 mission — the 11th time that SpaceX, the rocket company run by Elon Musk, has launched four astronauts to the space station for NASA as part of a crew rotation.
NASA will begin coverage of the launch at 8 a.m. Eastern time, with liftoff from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida expected at 12:09 p.m. Ms. Cardman and her three crewmates — Michael Fincke of NASA, Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia — will be riding in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
The forecast predicts a 90 percent chance of favorable weather.
This is a trip that Ms. Cardman thought she would have made last year as the commander of Crew-9.
'Right now, it still feels a little bit surreal,' she said in an interview three weeks ago. She said she thought it would continue to feel that way until T+1 in the countdown — one second after the rocket had left the launchpad.
Last summer, Ms. Cardman's plans were scrambled by the troubled test flight of Boeing's Starliner. NASA decided that Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, the two astronauts who traveled to the I.S.S. in the Starliner, would return to Earth another way, and that set off a domino effect for the crews of later missions.
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