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Three-man, one-woman crew flies to Florida to prep for Friday launch to space station
Three NASA astronauts and their Russian cosmonaut crewmate flew to the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday to prepare for launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket early Friday, kicking off a planned six-month tour of duty aboard the International Space Station.
Flying in from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Crew 8 commander Matthew Dominick, co-pilot Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin landed at the Florida spaceport’s 3-mile-long runway at 1:45 p.m. EST. Barratt is a veteran of two previous space flights while his three crewmates are rookies.
NASA
“Wow, it’s great to be at the Cape!” Dominick said from the runway. “I’m a kid in the candy store. … It’s an incredible time to be involved in spaceflight.”
As if to prove his point, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 24 Starlink internet satellites from the nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station three hours after the station crew arrived in Florida, giving them a spectacular taste of things to come.
William Harwood/CBS News
A few hours later, NASA and SpaceX managers concluded a flight readiness review and tentatively cleared the crew for launch.
“It’s hard to believe that it’s been 25 years since we launched the first hardware for the International Space Station and that we’ve had crews up there for more than 23 years,” said Ken Bowersox, a former shuttle commander and now chief of NASA’s human spaceflight program. “Throughout that time, safely launching and returning our crew members has been a critical priority.
“Today’s review was very thorough. We talked about some of the technical items on the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft. We talked about the readiness of the crew and space station. At the end of the review, everybody pulled ‘go.'”
Dominick and company plan to strap in aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon — “Endeavour” — overnight Monday for a dress rehearsal countdown. A few hours later, SpaceX plans to test fire the Falcon 9’s first stage engines to clear the way for the reusable booster’s first flight.
Assuming the tests go well and the weather cooperates, the crew will strap in for real Thursday night and blast off from historic pad 39A at 12:04 a.m. Friday. That’s the moment Earth’s rotation will carry the pad into the plane of the space station’s orbit to enable a rendezvous.
SpaceX
Once in space, Dominick and Barratt will monitor a series of autonomously executed thruster firings to catch up with the space station early Saturday, moving in from behind and below. After looping up to a point directly in front of the outpost, Endeavour will press in for docking at the lab’s forward port at 7 a.m.
Standing by to welcome them aboard will be Soyuz crewmates Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, who were launched to the station last September.
Also on board the space station: Crew 7 commander Jasmin Moghbeli, European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen, Japanese flier Satoshi Furukawa and cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov, launched from the Kennedy Space Center last Aug. 25.
After a week-long handover period to help familiarize the Crew 8 fliers with the ins and outs of station operations, Moghbeli, Mogensen, Furukawa and Borisov will undock March 8 and return to Earth, splashing down off the coast of Florida to wrap up a 196-day mission.
“I truly can’t believe this adventure is almost over,” Moghbeli, a veteran Marine helicopter pilot, posted on social media. “This is what I’ve dreamed of since I was a little girl. I was afraid I might get here and be disappointed after having such high expectations my entire life but, if anything, this experience has surpassed all my expectations.”
The Crew 8 launch and docking is the first in a multi-step procedure by NASA and the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos to replace the space station’s seven long-duration crew members with a fresh set of operators. Crew rotations are generally carried out twice each year.
With Crew 8 on board the ISS and Crew 7 back on Earth, Roscosmos plans to launch veteran cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, Belarus guest flier Marina Vasilevskaya and NASA veteran Tracy Dyson on March 21 aboard the Soyuz MS-25/71S ferry ship.
The mission is known informally as a “taxi flight,” in which a short-duration crew delivers a fresh Soyuz to the station and then flies home aboard a Soyuz that is nearing the end of a six-month stay. But this time around, the taxi flight is needed to accommodate a yearlong stay in space by Kononenko and Chub.
Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya will return to Earth on April 2, along with NASA’s O’Hara, using the Soyuz MS-24/70S spacecraft that carried Kononenko, Chub and O’Hara to the station last September.
Kononenko and Chub will return to Earth with Dyson in September aboard the Soyuz MS-25/71S spacecraft delivered by Novitskiy.
Archaeologists in Pompeii unearthed a rare tiny home while excavating the site of the ancient Italian city, officials said. The home was buried beneath the ash and debris that wiped out Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. but elaborate frescoes painted onto its interior walls have remained largely intact.
The house came into view during an ongoing construction project in one section of Pompeii Archaeological Park called Insula dei Casti Amanti, or House of Chaste Lovers, the park said in a translated announcement. Its size was uncommonly small compared with others found in Pompeii, including some situated close by, and adding to the intrigue is the fact that it contains such lavish art inside.
Parco Archeologico di Pompei/Handout via REUTERS
The frescoes mainly depict scenes from classic mythology. One well-preserved painting of Hippolytus and Phaedra, two characters from a Greek tragedy, gave the home its provisional name, the House of Phaedra. Hippolytus and Phaedra also appear in a small painting found elsewhere in the house.
Outside of those characters, archaeologists discovered a fresco depicting an embrace between a satyr — another figure from Greek mythology that is part-man, part-goat — and a nymph as well as one of a pair of deities thought to be Venus and Adonis, the park said. Another may be an illustration of the Judgement of Paris, another Greek myth, although the scene was difficult to decipher because the fresco had been damaged.
Parco Archeologico di Pompei/Handout via REUTERS
They found more artwork in the courtyard outside the home, which primarily included illustrations of plants and animals such as a bird of prey and two snakes facing each other. The snakes were positioned around an altar, according to the park, and people would have placed offerings there.
Some items from the last offering before the eruption were still there. Archaeologists discovered a ceramic incense burner as well as a lamp, which had traces of sprigs of scented essences detected through laboratory analyses. They also found colored marble and a sculpture of a face related to the Greek god Dionysus at the altar.
Park officials said the discoveries made at the ancient home, and the home itself, could help shed light on some of the changes Roman society was undergoing during the first century of the common era, particularly in Pompeii, since it is architecturally and stylistically different from its neighbors. A scientific paper discussing the house’s unusual layout was published in the archaeological park’s digital magazine focused on Pompeii.
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Egypt’s president says it has proposed 2-day cease-fire in Gaza, exchange of Israeli and Palestinian captives
Egypt’s president on Sunday said his country has proposed a two-day cease-fire between Israel and Hamas during which four hostages held in Gaza would be freed and some Palestinian prisoners would be released.
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, speaking in Cairo, said the proposal also includes the delivery of humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip. This is the first time Egypt’s president has publicly proposed such a plan.
Egypt, along with Qatar and the United States, has been a key mediator for peace talks between Israel and Hamas since the war broke out more than a year ago. Months of negotiations sputtered to a halt in August.
El-Sissi said the proposal aims to “move the situation forward,” adding that once the two-day cease-fire goes into effect, negotiations would continue to make it permanent.
There hasn’t been a cease-fire in 11 months, since November’s weeklong pause in fighting in which 105 hostages were released in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners.
Egypt’s proposal comes as Israel’s top spy, Mossad chief David Barnea, is traveling to Doha on Sunday for talks with CIA Director William Burns and Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani.
There have not been any immediate reactions from Israel or Hamas to Egypt’s proposal.
During a government memorial Sunday for the Hebrew anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that “not every goal can be achieved through military operations.” He added that “painful compromises will be required” to return the hostages.
Egypt’s proposal came a day after Israeli strikes on Iran in response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel earlier this month. Iran’s supreme leader said the attack “should not be exaggerated nor downplayed,” while stopping short of calling for retaliation. It was Israel’s first open attack on its archenemy.
That exchange of fire has raised fears of an all-out regional war pitting Israel and the United States against Iran and its militant proxies, which include Hamas and the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, where Israel launched a ground invasion earlier this month after nearly a year of lower-level conflict sparked by the war in Gaza.
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