SpaceX blasts off to a date in space with ISS

The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon capsule blasted off at 1.03pm AEST from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon spacecraft blasts off from Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Centre on Thursday. Picture: NASA via AFP

After a series of delays, Elon Musk’s private company SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Thursday on the “Crew-3” mission.

The orbital outpost is currently operating with just one NASA astronaut in the US segment to welcome the incoming crew, after the astronauts of the earlier Crew-2 mission splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday night.

Crew-3’s Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn of the US and Matthias Maurer of Germany blasted off aboard a Crew Dragon capsule fixed to a Falcon 9 rocket at 9.03pm (1.03pm AEDT) from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The launch was greeted by applause in the SpaceX control room.

The spaceship, called Endurance, will dock with the ISS at 11.10am on Friday AEDT.

The flight was initially postponed from October 31 first for weather, then a “minor medical issue” affecting one of the crew. NASA did not say who it was but said it was not Covid-related.

US Air Force Colonel Chari, 44, is commanding the mission and making his first trip to space, the first NASA rookie to command a space flight since Gerald Carr, who commanded the Skylab 4 mission in 1973. Lieutenant Commader Barron, 34, and Dr Maurer, 51, are also making their space debuts. Medical doctor Dr Marshburn, 61, flew aboard a Space Shuttle in 2009 and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in a mission from 2012-13.

Commander Barron, who along with Colonel Chari was ­selected for the NASA corps in 2017, the most recent recruitment, previously served as a submarine warfare officer for the US Navy, while Dr Maurer, a materials science engineer, will become the 12th German in the cosmos.

Crew-3 is part of NASA’s multi -billion-dollar partnership with SpaceX that it signed after ending the Space Shuttle program in 2011 and aims to restore US capacity to carry out human space flight. The quartet will spend six months on the orbital outpost and conduct research to help inform future deep space exploration and benefit life on Earth. Highlights of the mission include an experiment to grow plants in space without soil, and to build optical fibres in ­micro­gravity, which research has suggested will be superior in quality to those made on Earth.

The Crew-3 astronauts will also conduct spacewalks to complete an upgrade of the station’s solar panels and will be present for two tourism missions, including Japanese visitors aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft at the end of the year and the Space-X Axiom crew, set for launch in February 2022.

AFP