A SpaceX rocket took off safely from Florida, USA, on Monday night (4), carrying a crew of three North American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut on their way to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin a scientific mission. six months in Earth's orbit.
The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called Endeavour, launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, along Florida's Atlantic coast.
A NASA-SpaceX live feed showed the 25-story rocket rising from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of steam and a reddish fireball that lit up the night sky.
The rocket consumes 700,000 gallons of fuel per second during launch, according to SpaceX.
The Falcon's upper stage lifted Endeavor into its initial orbit nine minutes after liftoff, with live video from the cockpit showing the four crew members strapped in side by side, dressed in their white and black flight suits with helmets.
“What an incredible ride to orbit,” astronaut Matthew Dominick, 42, the flight commander and one of three spaceflight newcomers aboard the capsule, radioed control outside Los Angeles. “A big thank you to SpaceX.”
“Really honored to fly this next-generation spacecraft with this next-generation crew,” said NASA veteran Michael Barratt, 64, from his seat next to Dominick.
The four crew members are expected to arrive at the space station this Tuesday morning (5), after a 16-hour flight, docking at the orbital laboratory around 420 km above Earth.
Designated Crew 8, the mission marks the eighth long-duration ISS crew that NASA has flown aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle since the private rocket venture founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk and based near Los Angeles began sending US astronauts into orbit in May 2020.
The last ISS crew was led by Dominick, a US Navy test pilot who made his first trip to orbit, and Barratt, a doctor who logged two previous flights to the space station and two spacewalks. Barratt is serving as the pilot for the mission.
Completing the team are NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, 53, an aerospace engineer and former CIA technical intelligence officer, and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, 41, a former military aeronautical engineer. He and Epps are new to spaceflight, just like Dominick.
Grebenkin is the latest cosmonaut to fly aboard a US spacecraft under a ride-sharing agreement signed in 2022 by NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite rising tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia's invasion of Ukraine .
Crew 8 will be welcomed aboard the space station by seven current occupants of the ISS – three Russians and the four astronauts of Crew 7, two from NASA, one from Japan and one from Denmark. The Crew 7 team is expected to depart the space station for a return flight to Earth about a week after Crew 8 arrives.
Crew 8 is expected to remain aboard the space station until the end of August, collectively carrying out around 250 experiments in the microgravity environment of the orbital platform.
The ISS, about the size of a football field and the largest man-made object in space, has been continuously operated by a U.S.- and Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
The first hardware for the outpost was released 25 years ago. It was conceived in part as a multinational venture designed to improve relations between Washington and Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War rivalries that gave rise to the original space race between the US and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960.
NASA said it is committed to keeping the space station in operation for at least another six years.
See launch moment:
We have liftoff! Three first-time fliers and a veteran are en route to the @Space_Station
Learn more about #Crew8 and their mission: https://t.co/CWKffPmm6M pic.twitter.com/GYBisbZmvv
— NASA (@NASA) March 4, 2024
(Reporting by Joe Skipper in Cape Canaveral and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham, Michael Perry and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Source: CNN Brasil
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