Leak delays Iowa astronaut Peggy Whitson’s space mission

Astronaut Peggy Whitson will have to wait a while longer to make her fifth trip into space.

The mission she was expected to command, Ax-4, had been delayed at the Kennedy Space Center Launch facility for a couple days for weather, and was delayed indefinitely after a liquid oxygen leak was discovered during final checks on the launchpad this past weekend. Crews from SpaceX will be repairing the leaks.

“Standing down from tomorrow’s Falcon 9 launch of Ax-4 to the @Space_Station to allow additional time for SpaceX teams to repair the LOx leak identified during post static fire booster inspections. Once complete — and pending Range availability — we will share a new launch date,” SpaceX shared in a post on X Tuesday night.

The Ax-4 mission is commanded by former NASA astronaut and now Axiom Space employee Peggy Whitson, a Beaconsfield, Iowa-native making what would be her fifth trip to space. Whitson has more than 38 years of experience with NASA. Her first journey into space came 23 years ago with NASA, and she was inducted into the astronaut Hall of Fame last month.

Whitson is leading three men whose seats were paid for by the governments of India and Hungary as well as Poland through its membership with the European Space Agency.

India’s Shubhanshu Shukla is taking the role of pilot while Hungary’s Tibor Kapu and Poland’s Sawosz Uznaski-Winiewski are mission specialists. None of those three countries have had national astronauts fly to space in more than four decades.

They plan to dock with the International Space Station one day after launch for about a two-week stay during which the quartet will work on about 60 science investigations representing 31 different countries. More than two dozen of those will be sponsored by the International Space Station National Laboratory.

In social media posts on Facebook leading up to the mission, Whitson said the experiments include safe methods for insulin-dependent astronauts to regulate needs in microgravity, and looking at the effectiveness of new drugs for inhibiting cancer cell growth.

This would be the third human spaceflight from the Space Coast in 2023 following SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission and the private polar orbital Fram2 mission.