WASHINGTON: An international crew of four astronauts had their planned launch to the International Space Station from Florida on Thursday postponed over bad weather, delaying a mission that had been watched by a rare gathering of senior Russian space officials in town for a meeting with Nasa’s acting chief.

The astronaut crew — two Nasa astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut — boarded SpaceX’s Dragon capsule sitting atop its Falcon 9 rocket at Kennedy Space Centre and were due to lift off at 12:09pm.

But roughly a minute before launch, SpaceX mission controllers called a hold on the countdown because of stormy clouds that had been approaching the launchpad. The start of the astronauts’ mission of at least six months on the ISS will move to Friday, Nasa officials said.

The attempted mission, called Crew-11, includes Nasa astronauts Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui. They will replace the Crew-10 crew on the ISS, which departs on August 6. While US-Russian tensions over the war in Ukraine limited contact between the two space agencies, they have continued to share astronaut flights and cooperate on the ISS, a 25-year-old totem of scientific diplomacy crucial to maintaining the two space powers’ storied human spaceflight capabilities.

Russian space chief says cooperation with Nasa to continue till 2028

While normal long-duration ISS missions are six months, the Crew-11 mission may be the first of many to last eight months, part of a new effort to align US mission schedules with Russia’s.

The mission will be the first spaceflight for Cardman, who was selected as a Nasa astronaut in 2017, and Platonov, an engineer trained in aircraft operations and air traffic management who was selected to be a cosmonaut in 2018.

“We know that he’s in good hands,” Sergei Krikalev, Roscosmos human spaceflight chief and a veteran cosmonaut, said of Platonov during a press conference on Wednesday.

ISS cooperation until 2028

The head of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos said on Thursday that he had agreed with his Nasa counterpart during talks in the United States to extend the International Space Station’s (ISS) operation until 2028.

Space is one of the final areas of US-Russia cooperation amid an almost complete breakdown in relations between Moscow and Washington over the Ukraine conflict.

Roscosmos said earlier this week that its chief, Dmitry Bakanov, arrived in the United States for talks with Nasa’s acting administrator Sean Duffy, the first such meeting since 2018.

“The dialogue went well. We agreed that we will operate the ISS until 2028... And we will work on the issue of de-orbiting it until 2030,” Bakanov was quoted as saying by the TASS news agency.

Bakanov was also due to meet the Nasa’s Crew-11 mission team, including Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, ahead of the launch aboard the SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Published in Dawn, Aug 1st, 2025