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New Delhi, Jun 14 (PTI) Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla and three others are expected to travel to the International Space Station on June 19, after SpaceX successfully resolved the liquid oxygen leak in its Falcon-9 rocket, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced on Saturday.

The Axiom Space mission was to blast off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on June 11, but the launch had to be delayed first due to a fuel leak in SpaceX’s Falcon-9 rocket and then due to a leak in the Russian section of the International Space Station (ISS).

“Axiom Space is now targeting June 19, 2025, for the launch of the Ax-04 mission,” ISRO said.

Former NASA astronaut and director of human spaceflight at Axiom Space, Peggy Whitson, will command the commercial mission, while Shukla will serve as the pilot. The two mission specialists are European Space Agency (ESA) project astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of Poland and Tibor Kapu of Hungary.

The 14-day mission will “realise the return” to human spaceflight for India, Poland and Hungary.

The astronauts were originally scheduled for lift-off on May 29, which was put off to June 8, June 10 and June 11, when SpaceX, the providers of the launch rocket and the space capsule, detected a liquid oxygen leak in the Falcon-9 rocket.

At a pre-launch press conference on June 10, SpaceX Vice President William Gerstenmaier said engineers had detected a liquid oxygen (LOX) leak on the Falcon-9 booster during the re-entry phase of its previous mission that was not fully repaired during refurbishment.

“SpaceX team has confirmed that all the issues, that led to earlier postponement of the launch, have been duly addressed,” Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, Jitendra Singh, said in a post on X.

On June 11, ISRO Chairman V Narayanan said that after discussions on the topic by a team from India’s national space agency with the experts from Axiom and SpaceX, it was decided to correct the leak and carry out necessary validation tests before clearing for the launch.

Narayanan is an expert in liquid propulsion systems and played a key role in the development of cryogenic engines and the human rating of ISRO’s LVM3 rocket that will be used for India’s Gaganyaan human spaceflight mission, likely in 2027.

“Safety and mission integrity remain our top priorities,” Narayanan asserted two days later as NASA said it was working with Roscosmos to address the issue of a leak in the Russian section of the ISS.

On Friday, SpaceX said it had carried out a wet rehearsal of the Falcon-9 rocket to ensure the readiness of the launch vehicle.

“During a follow-on coordination meeting between ISRO, Axiom Space, and SpaceX, it was confirmed that the liquid oxygen leak observed in the Falcon 9 launch vehicle has been successfully resolved,” the ISRO said in a statement.

“Separately, Axiom Space informed that they are working closely with NASA to assess the pressure anomaly in the Zvezda Service Module on board the International Space Station,” it said. PTI

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Federal staff and is auto-published from a syndicated feed.)