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SpaceX launched a four-person crew to orbit the International Space Station early Thursday, with a Russian cosmonaut and a United Arab Emirates astronaut joining two NASA crews for the flight.
SpaceX’s launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavor, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. ET from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
A live NASA webcast showed the 25-story-tall spacecraft rising from the launch tower as nine Merlin engines roared in clouds of steam and red fireballs that lit up the pre-dawn sky.
The flight came 72 hours after an initial launch attempt was scrapped in the final minutes of Monday’s early countdown due to a blockage in the engine’s ignition fluid flow. NASA said the problem was fixed by replacing the clogged filter and cleaning the system.
About nine minutes after launch on Thursday, the rocket’s upper stage sent Crew Dragon into its initial orbit as it hurtled through space at more than 20 times the speed of sound. Meanwhile, the reusable Falcon booster returns to Earth and lands safely on a recovery ship, called “Just Read the Instructions,” floating in the Atlantic.
Moments after the capsule reached orbit, SpaceX’s mission control manager was heard joking over the radio to the crew: “If you enjoy the ride, don’t forget to give it five stars.”
The crew commander, NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen, radioed back, “We thank you for a wonderful trip to orbit today.”
Docking is expected early Friday
The trip to the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory that orbits about 420 kilometers above Earth, is expected to take almost 25 hours, with a rendezvous planned for about 1:15 a.m. on Friday.
The crew’s six-month science mission will include about 200 experiments and technology demonstrations, ranging from research on human cell growth in space to controlling flammable materials in microgravity.
Designated Crew 6, the mission is the sixth long-duration ISS team NASA has launched at SpaceX since the private rocket venture founded by Elon Musk – the billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla and social media platform Twitter – began sending American astronauts into orbit in May 2020.
The latest ISS crew is led by Bowen, 59, a US Navy submarine officer who has logged more than 40 days in orbit as a veteran of three Space Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks. Fellow NASA astronaut Warren (Woody) Hoburg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator designated as the pilot of Crew 6, made his first space flight.
Crew 6’s mission is also notable for including UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly into space and the first to launch from US soil as part of a long-running space station team.
Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 is Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 42, who like Alneyadi is a spacecraft engineer and rookie designated as the team’s mission specialist.
Fedyaev is the second cosmonaut to fly on an American spacecraft under a joint deal signed in July by NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Crew 6 team will be welcomed to the space station by the seven current occupants of the ISS – three NASA crew members, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly into space, along with three Russian and Japanese astronauts.
The ISS, about the length of a football field, has been continuously operated for more than two decades by a US-Russia-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
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