The next long-duration crew of the International Space Station (ISS) was launched on Wednesday by Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket business, with a Russian cosmonaut joining two Americans and a Japanese astronaut on board.
At noon EDT (1600 GMT), the SpaceX launch vehicle—a Falcon 9 rocket atop a Crew Dragon capsule named Endurance—launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, into a clear sky.
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The two-stage, 23-story-tall Falcon 9 was visible soaring from the launch tower during a live NASA broadcast of the launch as its nine Merlin engines roared to life.
The rocket's upper stage was prepared to place the Crew Dragon into a first orbit minutes after launch.
The reusable lower-stage booster, on the other hand, is built to return to Earth and land on a drone recovery craft that is cruising in the ocean.
The four-person crew will launch a 150-day science mission from the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday evening after arriving at the orbital laboratory approximately 29 hours later. The ISS is located 420 kilometres above Earth.
Since SpaceX, a for-profit rocket company created by Tesla owner Elon Musk, started launching US astronauts into space in May 2020, Nasa has flown five full-fledged ISS crews on its Crew-5 mission.
Nicole Aunapu Mann, a 45-year-old combat veteran pilot, is in charge of the most recent crew. She is making spaceflight history as the first indigenous woman to be launched into orbit by NASA and the first woman to occupy the commander's seat of a SpaceX Crew Dragon.
Despite heightened US-Russian tensions over the conflict in Ukraine, Anna Kikina, a 38-year-old female cosmonaut on active duty with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, made a rare voyage aboard an American spacecraft as part of the Crew-5 mission.
In 2002, a NASA space shuttle carried the final cosmonaut to travel to orbit aboard a US rocket ship.
According to a new ride-sharing agreement that Nasa and Roscosmos inked in July, Kikina is basically swapping places with a NASA astronaut who took her seat on a Russian Soyuz voyage to the ISS last month.
Colonel of the US Marine Corps and combat-experienced fighter pilot Commander Mann has a master's degree in engineering with a focus on fluid mechanics. She is also one of the first 18 astronauts chosen by NASA for the planned Artemis missions, which will attempt to send people back to the moon later this decade, more than 50 years after the Apollo lunar programme came to an end.
Mann will make history by becoming the first Native American woman to travel to space as a registered member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes. Only one other native American, John Herrington, was sent into orbit in a shuttle mission in 2002.
Josh Cassada, 49, a U.S. Navy aviator and test pilot with a degree in high-energy particle physics, is the designated pilot for the launch on Wednesday. He is a fellow spaceflight novice and Mann's NASA astronaut classmate.
The experienced astronaut Koichi Wakata, 59, a robotics expert making his fifth trip to space, completes the crew from Japan's space agency JAXA.
Seven current ISS inhabitants will greet the Crew-5 team, including the three Americans and one Italian who made up the Crew-4 team, two Russians, and the NASA astronaut who travelled to orbit on a Soyuz voyage.
The newcomers are entrusted with carrying out more than 200 experiments, many of which are geared toward medical research. These investigations range from the study of bacteria growing in microgravity to 3-D "bio-printing" of human tissue.
(With inputs from Reuters)
