a multicultural crewconsisting of two American astronauts, one Russian and one Emirati, will take off from Florida early Monday morning aboard a SpaceX rocket to the International Space Station (ISS).

Launch is scheduled from Kennedy Space Center at 1:45 AM. According to forecasts, the weather conditions will be 95% favorable. The Dragon capsule in which the four passengers travel must dock at the ISS after a journey of about a day.

Sultan Al Nejadi, 41, becomes the fourth astronaut from an Arab country in history, and the first from his country, to spend six months in space. “We are physically, mentally and technically prepared,” he told reporters when he arrived at the space center on Tuesday. “It’s a great honor to be here, even a privilege,” he added.

The mission also includes a Russian astronaut, Andrey Fedyaevjust as tensions between Washington and Moscow are at their peak, one year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Before the Moscow offensive, it was already planned that the Russians would travel with SpaceX and the Americans with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, an exchange program that was maintained. The ISS represents one of the last areas of cooperation between the two countries.

When asked about the impact of these political tensions on the crew, the mission commander, the American Stephen Bowenreplied this Tuesday that it was “rarely do these topics come up in everyday conversation”and that he and his companions “remained focused on the mission.”

Called “Crew-6”, this is the sixth regular mission to travel to the ISS aboard a SpaceX ship. The capsule that will carry them, called Endeavor, has already flown into space three times.

NASA contracts the services of the American company to send its astronauts to the laboratory about every six months. There they conduct scientific experiments and take care of the maintenance of the station, which has been inhabited for more than 22 years.

Crew-6 replaces the four members of Crew-5 (two Americans, one Russian and one Japanese), who arrived in October 2022 and will return to Earth aboard their own SpaceX ship.

Also on board the ISS are three other passengers (two Russians and one American), who arrived by Soyuz spacecraft. The Russian missile leaked in December. The country’s space agency, Roscosmos, sent a rescue craft, which successfully docked with the ISS on Saturday.