Free Republic

NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev—the four members of NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 mission—are scheduled to splash down off the coast of Florida at 12:17 a.m. EDT (0417 UTC) on Monday, Sept. 4, concluding their six-month stay in low Earth orbit.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was scheduled to launch the Crew-6 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA early Monday morning (Feb. 27) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But the launch team called the effort off less than 2.5 minutes before T-0, citing a ground-system issue. "Teams were tracking a ground issue with TEA-TEB — that's the ignition fluid that actually sparks with the oxidizer and allows the engines to fire," NASA commentator Gary Jordan said during the agency's webcast of Monday's launch attempt. That issue could not resolved in time ahead of the instantanteous launch window...

Lt. Col. Chase J. Nielsen, a Utah man and member of the famed "Doolittle Raiders" who bombed Japan in 1942 -- in a retaliation attack from Pearl Harbor -- passed away on Friday at the age of 90. Nielsen was a navigator in one of the most daring air raids in American history, when 16 B-25 bombers took off from an aircraft carrier and bombed Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Nielsen and his crew -- named "Crew 6," because of the order in which they left the aircraft carrier -- ditched the plane off the coast of China after it...