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The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket topped with an autonomously
operated Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Endeavor was launched from
NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, along Florida's
Atlantic coast, at 10:53 p.m. EST (0353 GMT Monday).
A live NASA-SpaceX webcast showed the 25-story-tall rocketship
ascending from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines
roared to life in billowing clouds of vapor and a reddish
fireball that lit up the night sky. The rocket consumes 700,000
gallons of fuel per second during launch, according to SpaceX.
The Falcon's upper stage delivered Endeavor to its initial orbit
nine minutes after liftoff, with live video from the cabin
showing the four crew members strapped in side by side garbed in
their helmeted white-and-black flight suits.
"What an incredible ride to orbit," astronaut Matthew Dominick,
42, the flight commander and one of three spaceflight rookies
aboard the capsule, radioed to control outside of Los Angeles.
"A big thank-you to SpaceX."
"Really honored to fly this new-generation spaceship with this
new-generation crew," NASA veteran Dr. Michael Barratt, 64,
chimed in from his seat beside Dominick.
The four crew members were scheduled to reach the space station
early on Tuesday after a 16-hour flight, docking with the
orbital laboratory some 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.
Designated Crew 8, the mission marks the eighth long-duration
ISS team that NASA has flown aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle
since the private rocket venture founded in 2002 by billionaire
Elon Musk and headquartered near Los Angeles began sending U.S.
astronauts to orbit in May 2020.
The latest ISS crew was led by Dominick, a U.S. Navy test pilot
making his first trip to orbit, and Barratt, a physician who has
logged two previous flights to the space station and two
spacewalks. Barratt is serving as mission pilot.
Rounding out the team are fellow NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps,
53, an aerospace engineer and former technical intelligence
officer for the CIA, and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, 41, a
former military aircraft engineer. Both he and Epps, like
Dominick, are spaceflight rookies.
Grebenkin is the latest cosmonaut to fly aboard a U.S.
spacecraft under a ride-sharing deal signed in 2022 by NASA and
the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite heightened tensions
between Washington and Moscow over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Crew 8 will be welcomed aboard the space station by seven
current ISS occupants - three Russians and the four astronauts
of Crew 7, two from NASA, one from Japan and one from Denmark.
The Crew 7 team is expected to depart the space station for a
flight back to Earth about a week after Crew 8's arrival.
Crew 8 is expected to remain aboard the space station until the
end of August, collectively performing about 250 experiments in
the microgravity environment of the orbital platform.
The ISS, about the length of a football field and the largest
human-made object in space, has been continuously operated by a
U.S.-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11
European countries.
The first hardware for the outpost was launched 25 years ago. It
was conceived in part as a multinational venture designed to
improve relations between Washington and Moscow following the
Soviet Union's collapse and the end of Cold War rivalries that
gave rise to the original U.S.-Soviet space race in the 1950s
and 1960s.
NASA has said it is committed to keeping the space station in
operation for at least six more years.
(Reporting by Joe Skipper in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and Steve
Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Will Dunham, Michael Perry and
Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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