The eighth manned commercial mission from NASA and SpaceX to the International Space Station (ISS) took off this Sunday from Florida, composed of three Americans and one Russian, after the launch was postponed twice due to strong winds at the takeoff center.
On Sunday, the launch occurred as planned, at 10:53 p.m. local time on the US east coast (3:53 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center, in central Florida, aboard a spacecraft Dragon, Endeavor, from pad 39A powered by a Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and Russian Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin travel aboard the new SpaceX Crew-8 commercial mission.
These flights began in 2020 and have allowed the United States to send astronauts from American soil again after the cancellation of the space shuttle program in 2011.
The crew is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Tuesday after a 16-hour flight and after docking at the orbital laboratory, about 420 kilometers from Earth. The crew is expected to remain aboard the space station until the end of August, collectively conducting about 250 experiments in the microgravity environment of the orbital platform.
Designated Crew 8, the mission marks the eighth long-duration ISS crew that NASA has carried aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle since the private rocket company founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk and based near Los Angeles began sending American astronauts into orbit in May 2020.
