SpaceX and NASA Delay Astronaut Launch for ‘Additional Analysis’

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A SpaceX and NASA mission that was scheduled to launch four astronauts — representing four countries and space agencies from around the world — to the International Space Station was abruptly canceled Thursday night.

It was not immediately clear the exact reason for the delay, which was announced late Thursday night. The astronauts’ SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft was scheduled to launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:50 a.m. ET Friday.

In a social media post, SpaceX only said it was pushing back the launch time to Saturday, Aug. 26 at 3:27 a.m. because it “provides teams additional time to complete and discuss analysis.”

“The vehicles remain healthy and the crew is ready to fly,” according to the website mail Shared on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.

During the live broadcast, NASA spokesperson Rob Navias said that “mission managers met and chose to delay the Crew-7 launch by 24 hours to give more time to close some of the open paperwork.”

The latest forecast from the US Space Force, which oversees the rocket launches, puts a 95 percent chance that the weather will be suitable for launch on Saturday.

Among the four astronauts slated to be launched aboard this mission, dubbed Crew-7, are Yasmine Mokbly of NASA, who will be the mission commander; Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen, representing the European Space Agency; Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA; and Russian cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov of Roscosmos.

Once at the space station, the seven cosmonauts will be joined by Mogbili, Mogensen, Furukawa and Borisov. Already in the orbital laboratory.

The Crew-7 astronauts will spend about five days taking over operations from the SpaceX Crew-6 astronauts who have been on the space station since March.

The mission will be the eighth flight operated by NASA and SpaceX as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, which has been ferrying astronauts to the space station since SpaceX’s first crewed mission in 2020.