At 3:52 a.m. ET, SpaceX successfully launched the crew from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The astronauts will now spend around 17 hours en route to the ISS, and are expected to dock with the space station about 8:15 p.m. ET, according to NASA.
SpaceX is ready to launch its eighth crewed mission to space in the early morning hours, this time carrying three NASA astronauts and an Italian astronaut to the International Space Station.
Their flight will kick off a six-month tenure on board the ISS, as part of SpaceX’s pledge to NASA to carry humans to and from the orbiting lab on a regular basis.
Crew-4 is SpaceX’s fourth operational human spaceflight mission to the International Space Station for NASA.
As part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which aims to employ privately built spacecraft to ferry crews to low Earth orbit, the company has been carrying humans to the space station.
SpaceX launched its first crew to the International Space Station in 2020 on the company’s Crew Dragon spaceship, and has been steadily increasing the number of crewed missions since then.
Two experienced pilots are on board: NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, both of whom have previously visited the International Space Station.
For this trip, they’ll be joined by two newcomers: NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Bob Hines, who were both selected as astronauts in 2017. Watkins’ mission will also make history, since she will be the first Black woman to serve as a long-term crew member on the International Space Station.
Watkins described her flight as “definitely a big milestone, I believe both for our agency and for the country.”
“And I think it’s really just a tribute to the legacy of the Black women astronauts that have come before me, as well as to the exciting future ahead. And so I’m honored to be just a small part of that legacy moving forward.”
Crew-4 is taking place less than two days after SpaceX returned from the International Space Station with another crew of four, albeit that crew did not contain any government flyers.
SpaceX flew four private astronauts to the International Space Station on a Crew Dragon on April 8th for Axiom Space, a commercial aerospace company that has contracted with SpaceX to fly a series of human spaceflight flights to the space station.
The majority of Axiom flyers paid a projected $55 million for their seats on the Crew Dragon in exchange for agreeing to conduct experiments while aboard the station and assisting Axiom in developing guidelines for future launches of people to commercial space stations.
The Axiom crew were intended to return to Earth after an eight-day stay on the International Space Station, but their return was postponed by a week due to poor weather in the area where they were to splashdown in Florida.
NASA had to postpone the launch of Crew-4 due to the Axiom flight’s delay, since the agency needed around two days to prepare between splashdown and launch. Finally, on Monday afternoon, the Axiom crew was able to return home, clearing the way for Crew-4 to launch on Wednesday morning.
Crew-4 is scheduled to launch at 3:52 a.m. ET from SpaceX’s Launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA plans to broadcast live coverage of the launch beginning at 12 a.m. ET on Wednesday morning
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