Three American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut took off from Florida on Sunday evening to the International Space Station (ISS), where they will stay for about six months.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at 10:53 p.m. local time (03:53 a.m. GMT Monday), lighting up the night sky with a long, brilliant cloud of orange flames.
A few minutes after firing, the launch vehicle flew across the Atlantic at a speed of around 6,000 mph (9,700 km/h), NASA commentators described.
The ship, which has three men and one woman on board, took about nine minutes to get into orbit. It has to dock with the ISS to relieve four crew members from the space laboratory.
The start, originally planned for Saturday, was postponed by 24 hours due to unfavorable weather.
The capsule attached to the tip of the rocket, called “Endeavor,” has already been used by Elon Musk’s company on four manned missions.
This time the four passengers are members of Crew-8, the eighth regular rotational mission of the American crew on the ISS, which SpaceX carried out for NASA.
The American Michael Barratt is the only Crew 8 astronaut who has already visited the flying laboratory.
However, for the other two Americans, Matthew Dominick and Jeanette Epps, as well as the Russian cosmonaut Alexandre Grebionkin, it is the first space flight.
NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which jointly operate the ISS, have launched an astronaut exchange program in which each takes turns transporting a crew member from the other country.
This program was maintained despite the war in Ukraine and the ISS is now one of the very few cooperation partners between Washington and Moscow.
The Crew-8 members will join the seven people already on the ISS.
After a handover period of a few days with the four members of Crew-7 – an American, a Dane, a Japanese and a Russian – they return to Earth aboard their own Dragon capsule.
More than 200 scientific experiments must be carried out during the six months that Crew-8 spends in the flying laboratory, which has been permanently inhabited for 23 years.
While the first years of the station's life were devoted to construction, astronauts can now devote more time to science.
“Many of the things we dreamed of a long time ago are becoming reality today,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said this week, citing stem cell research as an example.
But the station's age also has a downside: NASA and Roscomos are monitoring a “leak” at the end of a Russian module whose flow has increased recently, explained this week Joel Montalbano, head of the ISS Station program at NASA.
A hatch is currently permanently closed to isolate the leak from the rest of the station.