SpaceX rocket takes off with NASA crew to space station

SpaceX, the rocket company owned by Elon Musk, launched the next long-lived crew from NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) into space on Wednesday, including a Russian cosmonaut hitching a ride with two Americans and a Japanese astronaut as part of the mission from Florida.

SpaceX’s launch vehicle, a Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon capsule dubbed the Endurance, took off in clear skies at midday local time from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

The four-member crew and their autonomous flying capsule are due to arrive at the ISS in 29 hours on Thursday night to begin a 150-day science mission aboard the orbiting laboratory some 420 km above Earth.

The mission, designated Crew-5, marks the fifth full-fledged ISS crew that NASA has flown aboard a SpaceX vehicle since the private rocket venture founded by Tesla owner Musk began sending American astronauts, in May 2020.

The latest team is being led by Nicole Aunapu Mann, 45, a veteran combat pilot who makes spaceflight history as the first indigenous woman sent into orbit by NASA and the first woman to assume the post of commander of a SpaceX Crew Dragon. .

The Crew-5 mission is also notable for the inclusion of Anna Kikina, 38, the only female cosmonaut in active service with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, performing a rare flight aboard a US spacecraft despite rising US tensions. and Russia for the war in Ukraine. The last cosmonaut to guide a US rocket into orbit was in 2002 on a NASA space shuttle.

The Crew-5 team will be greeted by seven existing ISS occupants, the Crew-4 team, consisting of three Americans and an Italian astronaut, as well as two Russians and the NASA astronaut who flew with them to orbit on a NASA flight. Soyuz.

The newcomers are tasked with conducting more than 200 experiments, many of them focused on medical research ranging from 3D “bioprinting” of human tissue to studying bacteria grown in microgravity.