SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket business, blasted a four-man crew to orbit en route to the International Space Station early Thursday, with a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates joining two NASA crewmates for the flight.
The SpaceX launch vehicle, composed of a Falcon 9 rocket atop an autonomously flown Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Endeavour, lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT).
The 25-story-tall spaceship was seen soaring from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lighted up the pre-dawn sky in a live NASA livestream
The flight came 72 hours after an original launch attempt was canceled in the closing minutes of the countdown early Monday due to a blockage in the flow of engine-ignition fluid. NASA stated that the issue was resolved by changing a clogged filter and purging the system.
The Crew Dragon was brought into preliminary orbit around nine minutes after the rocket’s launch on Thursday, as it rocketed through space at more than 20 times the speed of sound. Meanwhile, the reusable lower-stage Falcon booster returned to Earth and successfully landed on a recovery barge dubbed “Just Follow the Instructions” drifting in the Atlantic.
Shortly after the capsule reached orbit, a SpaceX mission control manager was heard humorously radioing to the crew: “If you enjoyed your flight, please don’t forget to give us five stars.”
“We’d like to thank you for the amazing voyage to orbit today,” said the crew’s commander, NASA astronaut Stephen Bowen.
The journey to the International Space Station (ISS), a laboratory orbiting about 250 miles (420 kilometers) above Earth, was slated to take roughly 25 hours, with a rendezvous scheduled for about 1:15 a.m. EST (0615 GMT) on Friday.
The crew’s six-month science mission will include over 200 experiments and technology demonstrations ranging from human cell growth in space to managing flammable materials in microgravity.
The mission, dubbed Crew 6, marks NASA’s sixth long-term ISS team to fly aboard SpaceX since Musk, the billionaire CEO of electric car maker Tesla (TSLA.O) and social media site Twitter, began transporting American astronauts to orbit in May 2020.
Bowen, 59, a former US Navy submarine officer who has spent more than 40 days in space as a veteran of three Space Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks, commanded the newest ISS crew. Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an engineer and commercial aviator designated as Crew 6 pilot, was also making his maiden spaceflight.
The Crew 6 mission also was remarkable for its inclusion of UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, only the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from U.S. soil as part of a long-duration space station team.
Completing the four-man Crew 6 consisted of Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev, 42, who, like Alneyadi, is an engineer and spaceflight novice selected as the team’s mission specialist.
Fedyaev is the second cosmonaut to fly aboard an American spacecraft as part of a renewed ride-sharing agreement struck in July by NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos, despite heightened tensions between Washington and Moscow following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Seven current ISS inhabitants will greet the Crew 6 team aboard the space station: three NASA crew members, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to travel into space, three Russians, and a Japanese astronaut.
The ISS, which is roughly the length of a football field, has been in continuous operation for more than two decades by a US-Russian collaboration led by Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries.
