SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, was set to launch the next International Space Station crew early Monday morning, with an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates and a Russian cosmonaut joining two NASA crew members for the flight, Reuters reported. .

SpaceX’s launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket with an autonomous Crew Dragon capsule named Endeavor, was scheduled to lift off at 1:45 a.m. ET (06:45 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The four crew members are due to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) in about 25 hours on Tuesday morning to begin a six-month mission in microgravity aboard the orbiting laboratory about 420 km above Earth.

The mission, called Crew 6, is the sixth long-duration crew to the ISS that NASA has taken aboard SpaceX since the private rocket company founded by Musk began sending American astronauts into orbit in May 2020.

NASA said the mission’s launch readiness check was completed on Saturday and the flight was given the green light to launch as planned.

“All systems and weather are good for launch,” Musk tweeted on Sunday.

The latest ISS crew is led by mission commander Steven Bowen, 59, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer who spent more than 40 days in orbit and a veteran of three space shuttle flights and seven spacewalks.

NASA’s second astronaut, Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator assigned as the pilot of Crew 6, will make his first space flight.

The Crew 6 mission is also notable for the participation of 41-year-old UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, only the second person from his country to fly into space and the first to launch from US territory as part of the space station’s long-term mission.