News Desk
CAPE CANAVERAL: Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX launched a four-man crew, including a Russian cosmonaut and United Arab Emirates astronaut, to orbit en route to the International Space Station (ISS) early on Thursday, joining two NASA crewmates for the flight. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off with the Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, at 12:34 am EST (0534 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral in US state of Florida, carrying into orbit two NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, along with United Arab Emirates (UAE) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi — only the second Emirati to fly to space — and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, for a science expedition at the space station.
A live NASA webcast showed the 25-story-high spacecraft lifting off from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life in billowing clouds of vapour as it flew into the pre-dawn sky.
About nine minutes after the launch, the space rocket’s upper stage delivered the Crew Dragon into preliminary orbit as it ripped through space at a speed over 20 times faster than sound. Meanwhile, the reusable lower-stage Falcon booster flew back to Earth, landing safely on a recovery vessel floating in NASA’s sixth commercial crew rotation mission with SpaceX aboard the orbital laboratory.
SpaceX will oversee a series of automatic spacecraft maneuvers during Dragon’s flight from its mission control center in Hawthorne, California, while NASA teams will monitor the operations in the space station throughout the flight from the Mission Control Center at the space agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Seven ISS occupants to welcome Crew 6 team
The spacecraft will dock outstation’s Harmony module ports Harmony module around 1:17 am on Friday. The Crew 6 team would be welcomed aboard the International Space Station by seven current ISS residents.
The ISS, which as long as a football field, has been continuously operated for over two decades by a US-Russian-led consortium that includes Japan, Canada and 11 European nations.
