Successfully launching a human Crew-8 trip to the International Space Station is SpaceX and NASA

A crew of three US astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut boarded a SpaceX rocket on Sunday night, heading to the International Space Station (ISS) for a six-month Earth orbit scientific mission. The rocket took off from Florida.

Starting from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, near Florida’s Atlantic coast, the two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, topped with an autonomously controlled Crew Dragon spacecraft named Endeavor, was launched at 10:53 p.m. EST (0353 GMT Sunday).

The rocketship, standing 25 stories tall, was seen rising from the launch tower in a live NASA-SpaceX broadcast. The night sky was illuminated by a fiery blaze and billowing clouds of vapor produced by the rocketship’s nine Merlin engines.

After a 16-hour voyage, the four crew members were expected to arrive at the space station early on Tuesday and dock with the orbiting laboratory around 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.

NASA has launched eight long-duration International Space Station teams on SpaceX rockets since the commercial rocket company, established in 2002 by entrepreneur Elon Musk and based close to Los Angeles, started launching American astronauts into space in May 2020. This mission is known as Crew 8.

Leading the most recent ISS crew were veteran NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, 64, a physician with two prior space station missions and two spacewalks, and mission commander Matthew Dominick, 42, a U.S. Navy test pilot flying his first space mission. Barratt is piloting the mission.

Co-pilot Alexander Grebenkin, 41, a former military aviation engineer, and aerospace engineer Jeanette Epps, 53, a former CIA technical intelligence officer, complete the crew. Like Dominick, he and Epps are novices in space travel.

Grebenkin is the most recent cosmonaut to go on a US spacecraft as part of a ride-sharing agreement between NASA and Roscosmos, which was signed in 2022. This is true even if Washington and Moscow are at odds over Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

Seven existing ISS occupants—three Russians and the four astronauts of Crew 7—as well as two representatives from NASA, one each from Japan and Denmark, will greet Crew 8 on board.

Approximately one week after the arrival of Crew 8, the members of Crew 7 are scheduled to leave the space station and return to Earth.

It is anticipated that Crew 8 will stay on the space station until the end of August, during which time they will conduct over 250 experiments in the orbiting platform’s microgravity.

Larger than a football field and the longest man-made structure in orbit, the International orbit Station (ISS) has been continually run by a joint U.S.-Russian team that also includes Canada, Japan, and eleven European nations.

Twenty-five years ago, the outpost’s initial hardware was introduced. Part of its conception was as an international endeavor aimed at mending Washington’s ties with Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union and the resolution of Cold War rivalry that sparked the first US-Soviet space race in the 1950s and 60s.

According to NASA, the space station will remain in service for a minimum of another six years. Reuters