SpaceX launch of private Ax-4 astronauts postponed indefinitely due to leaky ISS module
The SpaceX launch of four private astronauts has been delayed again.
The Ax-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) had been scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday morning (June 11), but a propellant leak in the booster nixed that plan.
And now, another leak — this one in Ax-4’s destination — has further postponed the liftoff.
Cosmonauts recently detected a “new pressure signature” in the Zvezda service module, part of the Russian segment of the ISS, NASA officials announced in an update today (June 12).
This development isn’t exactly a shock; this area first sprang a leak back in 2019, and cosmonauts have been dealing with it ever since, as the recent spot check shows.
The cosmonauts “sealed some additional areas of interest and measured the current leak rate,” NASA officials wrote in the update. “Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure.”
Still, the agency and Axiom Space, the Houston company that organized Ax-4, decided that grounding the mission for now is the prudent course of action.
Doing so “provides additional time for NASA and Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary,” NASA wrote in today’s update, referring to Russia’s space agency.
No new target launch date has been announced.
As its name suggests, Ax-4 will be Axiom’s fourth crewed mission to (and from) the ISS. The roughly two-week-long flight will be commanded by record-breaking former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is now Axiom’s director of human spaceflight.
The three other crew members are pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India, Polish mission specialist Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski and Hungarian mission specialist Tibor Kapu.
Nobody from India, Poland or Hungary has ever visited the ISS, so this trio will make history when Ax-4 is finally able to get off the pad.
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