Three American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut are due to depart overnight from Saturday to Sunday to the International Space Station as part of a routine crew rotation aboard the spacecraft, AFP reported, according to News.ro.

Three American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut will fly to the ISSPhoto: CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP / Profimedia

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off at 11:16 p.m. local time (04:16 GMT Sunday) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

However, the launch may be delayed due to weather conditions, which are expected to be only 40% favorable.

The Dragon capsule, which will carry the crew atop the rocket, has already been used for four previous manned missions.

This time, the four passengers are members of Crew-8, SpaceX’s eighth regular orbital mission for NASA.

“To the untrained eye, it seems almost natural that SpaceX is sending them there one by one,” NASA chief Bill Nelson admitted at a news conference this week.

American Michael Barratt is the only astronaut from Crew-8 who has already visited the International Space Station (ISS).

Instead, it will be the first flight into space for two other Americans – Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps, as well as for Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebyonkin.

NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which jointly operate the ISS, have created an astronaut exchange program in which each takes turns sending a crew member from another country.

This program survived despite the war in Ukraine, and now the ISS is one of the few subjects of cooperation between Washington and Moscow.

Crew-8 members will join seven people already on board the ISS.

After a several-day transfer period, the four members of Crew-7 – an American, a Dane, a Japanese and a Russian – will return to Earth aboard their own Dragon capsule.

Over 200 scientific experiments will be conducted in the six months of the Crew-8 crew in the flying laboratory, which has been a permanent resident for 23 years.

If the first years of the station’s life were devoted to its construction, now astronauts can devote more time to science.

But the station’s age also has a downside: NASA and Roscomos are monitoring a “leakage” that has recently increased in flow, Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS program manager, said this week.

The leak is at the end of the Russian module, where the Russian Progress spacecraft docks with the ISS. The hatch is now permanently closed to isolate the leak from the rest of the station.