NASA’s Crew-12 Mission Prepares for Predawn Launch

When Crew-12 took off, the Florida coast was still in the dark. Before five in the morning, there is a certain silence at Cape Canaveral that is only broken by gulls and the faint sound of cooling fluid on a fueled rocket. All of that disappeared at 5:15:56 a.m. Eastern time. For a brief moment, the pitch-black sky above the Atlantic took on the hue of late afternoon as nine Merlin engines on a Falcon 9 came to life.

It’s difficult to ignore how quickly these launches have become commonplace while simultaneously refusing to feel ordinary. On paper, Crew-12 is NASA’s Commercial Crew Program’s twelfth operational rotation, a number big enough that it doesn’t appear on many front pages these days. However, the fact that the members of Crew Dragon Freedom were traveling to a station that had been understaffed for weeks altered the entire timing.

The timing’s backstory is important. After one of its astronauts developed what NASA described as a serious but stable medical condition, Crew-11 returned home in mid-January, about a month ahead of schedule. In the 26-year history of the orbital lab, it was the first medical evacuation, leaving the International Space Station with three occupants instead of seven. The urgency of advancing Crew-12’s launch told its own story, but officials never said much more than was necessary, which felt right.

Liftoff was scheduled for March. Then the weather changed everything. Then the weather forced them once more. The calendar had practically become a character in the story by the time the rocket actually took off on Friday the 13th of all days. In an article for Spaceflight Now, seasoned spaceflight reporter Will Robinson-Smith described it as a “very lucky day.” Certain superstitions ought to be abandoned.

Observing Jessica Meir, who oversaw the mission, make her way to the pad while wearing her white SpaceX suit felt like a tiny circle. In 2019, she and Christina Koch accomplished the first all-female spacewalk. She is a marine biologist by training, the type of scientist who once traveled under Antarctic ice to study emperor penguins. She was now transporting three rookies to a station she was already familiar with: two rookies and a cosmonaut on his second flight.

Andrey Fedyaev was not supposed to be on the flight. Oleg Artemyev, a well-known figure from Roscosmos, held the original Russian seat. However, Artemyev was suddenly removed from the crew at the beginning of December. Roscosmos mentioned his “transition to other work,” a phrase that almost always has a different meaning. The Russian investigative agency According to The Insider, Artemyev violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations by allegedly taking pictures of SpaceX engines and documents at the Hawthorne, California facility, leading to his expulsion from the country. Not much has been said by SpaceX. Even less has been said by NASA. With less training, Fedyaev, who had previously flown Crew Dragon, slid into the seat. Convenient, in a sense.

The mission’s quietest and possibly most intriguing subplot was made possible by Sophie Adenot. The first career astronaut from the agency’s 2022 class to fly was the French ESA astronaut, a former military helicopter pilot. Her mission patch features a hummingbird, the tiniest creature on it, and a stylized lowercase epsilon, ε, which represents the idea that little things add up. During her months on the station, she will conduct nearly two hundred experiments, including ergonomic tests on EuroSuit, a new European intra-vehicular suit being developed by Decathlon and Spartan Space, among other companies. The sportswear giant’s appearance in spaceflight has a certain allure.

Minutes after takeoff, the Falcon 9 booster returned home and landed on Landing Zone 40, a brand-new recovery pad at the Cape that was used for the first time on this flight. Even after years of repetition, the sight of the booster landing while the upper stage was still propelling the crew into orbit is one of those moments that never gets old. The following afternoon, Valentine’s Day, the spacecraft docked at the Harmony module’s zenith port, bringing the station back to full seven-person capacity.

Observing all of this, one thing that sticks out is how the ordinary and the unusual now coexist so closely. A billion-dollar lab with a skeleton crew. A crew swap resulted from a low-key diplomatic incident. A rocket that lands before breakfast and illuminates the sky before dawn. It’s questionable if any of it should still feel exceptional. Maybe we’ve just grown accustomed to the future coming on schedule.