Space residents prep for spacewalk; cargo delivery this weekend

The Expedition 68 crew onboard the International Space Station are expecting a space delivery this weekend and also gearing up for a spacewalk on Friday.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon resupply ship atop is standing at the launch pad targeting a liftoff at 2:20 p.m. EST on Saturday from Kennedy Space Center. The cargo ship will arrive Sunday for an automated docking at 7:30 a.m. to the Harmony module's space-facing port, delivering a pair of new roll-out solar arrays, new space agriculture and biotechnology studies, and food, fuel, and crew supplies.

Dragon is expected to spend about a month attached to the orbiting outpost before it returns to Earth with research and return cargo, splashing down off the coast of Florida.

For the unversed, the SpaceX CRS-26 resupply mission was earlier scheduled to launch on November 22 but poor weather conditions forced NASA and the Elon Musk-owned space company to defer the launch to November 26.

The launch of the @SpaceX #Dragon cargo craft has been scrubbed for the day due to weather conditions on the @NASAKennedy launch site. The next launch attempt is Saturday at 2:20pm ET. pic.twitter.com/Mo3oxOiv7M

— International Space Station (@Space_Station) November 22, 2022

In parallel, three cosmonauts are preparing for an upcoming spacewalk at the space station. Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin are outfitting their Orlan spacesuits and checking them for leaks ahead of a spacewalk scheduled to begin at 6:15 a.m. on Friday.

The Russian duo will spend about seven hours on Friday relocating a radiator from the Rassvet module to the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module.