SpaceX launches four astronauts to ISS
WASHINGTON: A er a series of delays, Elon Musk’s private company SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Wednesday night on the ‘Crew-3 mission.
The orbital outpost is currently operating with just one Nasa astronaut in the US segment to welcome the incoming crew, a er the astronauts of the earlier Crew-2 mission splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday night.
Crew-3’s Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn of the United States and Ma hias Maurer of Germany blasted off aboard a Crew Dragon capsule fixed to a Falcon 9 rocket at 9.03pm local time (0203 GMT Thursday) from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
The launch was greeted by applause in the SpaceX control room.
The spaceship, called Endurance, will dock with the ISS at 7.10pm Thursday (0010 GMT Friday).
Crew-3 is part of Nasa’s multibillion-dollar partnership with SpaceX that it signed a er ending the Space Shu le programme in 2011 and aims to restore US capacity to carry out human spaceflight.
The quartet will spend six months on the orbital outpost and conduct research to help inform future deep space exploration and benefit life on Earth.
Scientific highlights of the mission include an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth media, and another to build optical fibres in microgravity, which prior research has suggested will be superior in quality to those made on Earth.
The Crew-3 astronauts will also conduct spacewalks to complete an upgrade of the station’s solar panels and will be present for two tourism missions, including Japanese visitors aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecra at the end of the year and the Space-X Axiom crew, set for launch in February 2022.