SpaceX early yesterday launched a four-person crew on a trip to the International Space Station (ISS), with a Russian cosmonaut and United Arab Emirates (UAE) astronaut joining two NASA crewmates on the flight.
The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, lifted off at 12:34am from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
A live NASA Web cast showed the 25-story-tall spacecraft ascending from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lit up the pre-dawn sky.
Photo: AFP
The launch was expected to accelerate the Crew Dragon to an orbital velocity of 28,164kph, more than 22 times the speed of sound.
The flight came 72 hours after an initial launch attempt was scrubbed in the final minutes of countdown early on Monday due to a clog in the flow of engine-ignition fluid. NASA said the problem was fixed by replacing a clogged filter and purging the system.
The trip to the ISS, a laboratory orbiting about 420km above Earth, was expected to take nearly 25 hours, with rendezvous planned for about 1:15am today, as the crew begins a six-month science mission in microgravity.
Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-term ISS team that NASA has flown aboard SpaceX since the private rocket venture founded by Elon Musk began sending US astronauts to orbit in May 2020.
The latest ISS crew was led by mission commander Stephen Bowen, 59, a onetime 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 Crew 6 pilot, was making his first spaceflight.
The Crew 6 mission is also notable 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 US soil as part of a long-duration space station team. UAE’s first-ever astronaut launched to orbit in 2019 aboard a Russian spacecraft.
Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 was Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, 42, who, like Alneyadi, is an engineer and spaceflight rookie designated as a mission specialist for the team.
Fedyaev is the second cosmonaut to fly aboard a US spacecraft under a renewed ride-sharing deal signed in July last year 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 is to be welcomed aboard the space station’s current occupants — three US NASA crew members, including commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first Native American woman to fly to space, along with three Russians and a Japanese astronaut.
The ISS, about the length of a football field, has been continuously operated for more than two decades years by a US-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
The Crew 6 mission follows two recent mishaps in which Russian spacecraft docked to the orbiting laboratory sprang coolant leaks apparently caused by micrometeoroids, tiny grains of space rock, streaking through space and striking the craft at high velocity.
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