NASA uses SpaceX rocket and sends 4 astronauts to space station

Three American astronauts and one German took off this Wednesday (10) at night, ten days later than initially scheduled, heading for the International Space Station (ISS), where they should stay for six months.

They will replace the crew that just left the ISS, which included two Americans, one Frenchman and one Japanese, who returned to Earth Monday night to Tuesday.

The four astronauts took off from Florida in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 9:03 pm local time (23:03 GMT).

The Dragon capsule is due to dock at the station on Thursday at 7:10 pm (21:10 GMT).

NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn, as well as European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer, held a quarantine days ago at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral before taking off.

The departure was supposed to be in late October, but the takeoff was delayed several times, mainly due to weather conditions and, later, “a minor health problem” in one of the astronauts, about which NASA did not give further details.

The space agency decided to bring the Crew-2 crew back to Earth before launching the Crew-3.

The transfer period between the two crews, which normally takes place in zero gravity for a few days, could not be carried out.

The mission is called Crew-3, as it is the third carried out by SpaceX on behalf of NASA. However, it is the fifth time that Elon Musk’s company has launched humans into orbit.

Prior to Crew-1 and Crew-2, a test mission (Demo-2) sent two astronauts to the ISS. And in September SpaceX also launched four tourists into space for three days.

tourist reception

Crew-3’s crew boarded a new Dragon capsule, “Endurance”.

For American Tom Marshburn, this will be his third time in space. He has already flown aboard a space shuttle in 2009 and then a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2012-2013. The other three astronauts will take the trip for the first time.

Matthias Maurer will be the twelfth German in space. One of the astronauts’ missions will be to observe the effects of diet on the intestinal flora and the immune system, whose defenses are often weakened after an extended stay in space.

The four will consume a wider selection of freeze-dried fruits and vegetables (pumpkin, kale…) and also barramundi, a fish.

They will also undertake spacewalks, primarily to continue the installation of new solar panels on the ISS.

And they will receive two tourist missions: one, at the end of the year, by Japanese people transported by a Soyuz spacecraft, and the other, in February 2022, by passengers on the Ax-1 mission, organized by the company Axiom Space in association with SpaceX.