Taking shelter from potential impact brought by Hurricane Ian, NASA’s Artemis I is rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Tuesday, September 27th, 2022, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. | Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Hurricane Ian’s fury has postponed NASA’s plan to send a fresh four-person crew to the International Space Station (ISS) on a SpaceX rocket. The agency announced yesterday that its Crew-5 mission has been pushed back by at least a day and will now launch no earlier than October 4th.
“Mission teams will continue to monitor the impacts of Ian on the Space Coast and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and could adjust the launch date again, as necessary,” NASA said in a blog post. “The safety of the crew, ground teams, and hardware are the utmost importance to NASA and SpaceX.”
The decision comes shortly after NASA made the call to send the Artemis I rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) from the launchpad for safekeeping…