A SpaceX rocket carrying two American astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an Emirati astronaut, took off on Thursday to reach the International Space Station, after the launch was canceled at the last minute on Monday.
Liftoff took place Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:34 a.m. local time (5:34 a.m. GMT).
“The #Crew6 launch took place March 2 at 12:34 a.m. (US East Coast, 5:34 a.m. GMT), lighting up the skies as the crew cruised into orbit aboard the Dragon Endeavor capsule. from @SpaceX,” the US space agency said on Twitter.
The Dragon capsule in which the four passengers are traveling is scheduled to dock with the space station (ISS) on Friday at 1:17 a.m. local time (6:17 a.m. GMT) after a journey of just over 24 hours. The astronauts will then stay there for about six months.
Monday, the takeoff had been canceled at the last minute due to a technical problem. NASA explained on Wednesday that the problem concerned the routing of a liquid used for the ignition of the engines, caused by a “clogged filter”.
The latter has been replaced and the teams are now ready to take off.
The crew, dubbed Crew-6, is made up of NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi, and Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fediaev.
Sultan al-Neyadi, 41, will become the fourth astronaut from an Arab country in history, the second Emirati, but the first from his country to spend six months in space.
Moreover, even if tensions between Washington and Moscow are at their highest a year after the Russian offensive in Ukraine, the two countries have maintained an exchange program allowing Russians to travel with SpaceX, and Americans to travel to aboard Russian Soyuz rockets. The space station is one of the few fields of cooperation still in progress between the two countries.
Crew-6 will replace the four members of Crew-5 (two Americans, a Russian and a Japanese), who arrived in October 2022 and who will return to Earth aboard their own SpaceX ship, after a few days of handover.
Three other passengers (two Russians and an American) are also on board the space station, they arrived with a Soyuz spacecraft. The ISS will therefore welcome no less than eleven people for a few days.
NASA pays the services of SpaceX to send its astronauts approximately every six months to the flying laboratory.
They conduct scientific experiments there and ensure the maintenance of the station, which has been permanently inhabited for more than 22 years.
Crew-6 is the sixth crew to visit the ISS on a regular rotational mission operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s company.