A SpaceX rocket carrying two American astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an Emirati astronaut launched Thursday to reach the International Space Station after the launch was canceled at the last minute on Monday.
The launch took place Thursday at 00:34 local time (5:34 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“The #Crew6 launch took place at 00:34 (US East Coast, 5:34 GMT) on March 2 and lit the sky as the crew boarded the Dragon Endeavor capsule from @SpaceX, the US -Space, crossed into orbit This was announced by the agency on Twitter.
The Dragon capsule, in which the four passengers will travel, is scheduled to dock with the Space Station (ISS) at 1:17 a.m. local time (6:17 a.m. GMT) on Friday after a journey of just over 24 hours. The astronauts will stay there for about six months.
The start on Monday was canceled at the last minute due to a technical problem. NASA said Wednesday the problem involved the line of a fluid used to ignite the engines, caused by a “clogged filter.”
The latter has been replaced and the teams are now ready to go.
The crew, dubbed Crew-6, consists 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.
Even as tensions between Washington and Moscow are at their highest a year after Russia’s offensive in Ukraine, the two countries have maintained an exchange program that allows Russians to travel on SpaceX and Americans to travel aboard Russian Soyuz rockets . The space station is one of the few ongoing fields of cooperation between the two countries.
Crew-6 will replace the four members of Crew-5 (two Americans, one Russian and one Japanese) who arrived in October 2022 and will return to Earth after a few days of handover aboard their own SpaceX ship.
Three other passengers (two Russians and one American) are also on board the space station, they arrived on a Soyuz spacecraft. The ISS will therefore welcome no fewer than eleven people for a few days.
NASA pays the services of SpaceX to send its astronauts to the flying lab about every six months.
They carry out scientific experiments there and take care of 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 as part of a regular rotating mission operated by billionaire Elon Musk’s company.