A northern Maine native is headed back to space.
Caribou’s Jessica Meir and three other astronauts onboard the SpaceX Crew-12 mission are expected to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida early Friday morning bound for the International Space Station. It’s Meir’s second trip to the ISS since becoming a NASA astronaut in 2013.
The crew, led by Meir as spacecraft commander, will travel aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket.
It’s expected to take between 16 and 24 hours for the spacecraft to reach the station.
The mission is a long-duration science expedition expected to last around eight months. Meir and her crew — which includes fellow New Englander Jack Hathaway, who is from Connecticut, as well as astronauts from France and Russia — are replacing SpaceX Crew-11 that launched on Aug. 1, 2025.
Crew-12 will join the crew of Expedition 74, who have been in orbit for more than three months, on the space station.
Meir, a 1995 Caribou High School graduate, previously spent 205 days aboard the ISS in 2019 and 2020 during Expedition 61 and 62, and served as a flight engineer.
During that stint, Meir was a part of the first three all-woman spacewalks alongside fellow NASA astronaut Christina Koch.
Meir earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Brown University in 1999, a master’s degree in space studies from International Space University in France in 2000 and a doctorate in marine biology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of San Diego in 2009.
She was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame in 2023 and the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame a year prior. Meir is also a member of the Alumni Hall of Fame at Caribou High School, where she remains an inspiration to students there and throughout Northern Maine.
“It makes things more real when people can see someone who came from the same background and place as they did,” Meir said in a 2020 interview with the Bangor Daily News.
While onboard the ISS, Crew-12 will “conduct a variety of science experiments to advance research and technology for future Moon and Mars missions and benefit humanity back on Earth,” NASA said in a release.
That research will include studying pneumonia-causing bacteria to improve treatments and investigating ways to enhance food production in space, the release said.
