SpaceX launched a four-person crew to the International Space Station early Thursday morning, part of the company’s ongoing contract with NASA.
(Bloomberg) — SpaceX launched a four-person crew to the International Space Station early Thursday morning, part of the company’s ongoing contract with NASA.
This mission, called Crew-6, is the seventh time Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has flown NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, and its ninth human spaceflight mission overall.
The crew, riding inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft, lifted off on top of a Falcon 9 rocket at 12:34 a.m. local time Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and separated from the rocket in orbit about 12 minutes later.
On board the flight are NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, who is riding as part of a crew-swap agreement, and Sultan Al Neyadi from the United Arab Emirates. Their capsule is scheduled to dock with the space station early Friday morning. The crew is set to live in orbit together for a standard six-month stay.
As the rocket was readied to lift off, Bowen said: “Once more unto the breach dear friends, Crew-6 is ready to launch.”
Once attached, the astronauts will enter the station, where they’ll be greeted by the seven-member crew already on board: three from a Soyuz mission who have been at the ISS since September, and four from the SpaceX Crew-5 mission who have been there since October.
A few days after the incoming crew is settled, the four astronauts from the Crew-5 mission will return back to Earth in their own Dragon capsule.
SpaceX had initially planned to launch Crew-6 on Feb. 27, but flight controllers postponed the launch roughly two and a half minutes before the planned takeoff due to an issue with the fluid used to ignite the engines.
Last week, Russia launched an uncrewed passenger spacecraft to the space station to serve as a lifeboat for three crew members whose return Soyuz vessel was damaged in December. The trio, one US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts, was initially set to return to Earth this spring, but were forced to delay their homecoming to later this year.
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