NASA is now aiming to launch four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday (February 13, 2026), after another delay due to weather conditions, the US agency announced. The goal is to launch the Crew-12 mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb.

13, with the window opening at 5:15 a. m.

local time (1015 GMT). “Mission teams completed a weather review Tuesday morning and have abandoned the launch opportunity for Thursday, Feb. 12, due to forecast weather conditions along Crew-12’s flight path,” NASA said in a statement.

NASA officials told a briefing Monday that the weather at the site in Florida has actually been favorable, but that forecast high winds along the rest of the East Coast are to blame for the delay. For example, these winds could complicate any potential emergency maneuver, such as an early deceleration of a spacecraft carrying astronauts. If Friday’s launch goes as planned, the astronauts should arrive at the space station by about 3:15 p.

m. Saturday.

Crew-12 includes Americans Jessica Meyer and Jack Hathaway, as well as French astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fadeyev. They remain in quarantine at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, awaiting detonation.

The passengers will replace Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January, a month earlier than planned for the first medical evacuation in space station history. The ISS, a science laboratory orbiting 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, has since been staffed by a skeleton crew of three people. Continuously inhabited for the past quarter-century, the old ISS will be de-orbited in 2030 and crashed in a different location in the Pacific Ocean.