Eight years after a nine-day stay on board the ISS, the Danish engineer is embarking on a long-term mission. For the occasion, he was the first foreign pilot of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which embarked the Crew 7 crew.
A non-American pilot
The ship Crew Dragon “Endurance” (Crew 7 mission) took off on August 26 at 7:27 UTC from the Kennedy Space Centerin Florida.
On board, four astronauts of four different nationalities: the American Jasmin Moghbeli, the Danish Andreas Mogensenthe Japanese Satoshi Furukawa and the Russian Konstantin Borissov.
This is the first time that a foreign astronaut has been entrusted with the piloting of the Crew Dragon of SpaceX.
Tenth mission to the ISS
The Aug. 27 launch marked SpaceX’s fifty-ninth orbital accomplishment since the start of the year, and the fourth to Earth. international space station.
It was also the tenth crew sent to theISS in the space of three years by SpaceX, which remains the only private operator capable of honoring the program CCP (Commercial Crew Program) of the Nasa – the first manned flight of the CST 100 spacecraft Starliner of Boeing is no longer expected before… March 2024, according to an official announcement dated August 7th.
Again eleven passengers on board
After a flight of just under 30 hours, the Endurance spacecraft docked safely with the module harmony of the ISS, where since March 28 theExpedition 69with seven astronauts and cosmonauts, passengers of the Soyuz MS 23 and Crew 6 capsules.
The former will return on September 27, two weeks after the latter.
The longest European command
In mid-September, when Expedition 70 will begin with the arrival of Soyuz MS 24 (occupied by the Russians Oleg Kononenko and Nikolaï Tchoub, and the American Loral O’Hara), Andreas Mogensen will become the station commander ( the sixth in Europe).
His command will last until the day before Crew 7 returns to Earth in February 2024, a little over five months: a record for a European astronaut.
Huginn Mission
astronautEuropean Space Agency since 2009, Andreas Mogensen was the only one of his class to have performed only one long-duration flight (mission IrISSSeptember 2-12, 2015).
During his new stay, baptized Huginn by the ESA (in reference to one of the two crows accomplices of the god Odin, in Norse mythology), he will carry out more than 30 European scientific experiments and technological demonstrations.
