SpaceX sends eighth batch of long-duration astronauts into NASA orbit

Crew 8 is expected to remain on the space station until the end of August

Florida:

A SpaceX rocket lifted off from Florida on Sunday night, carrying three American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut to the International Space Station (ISS) to begin a six-month science mission in Earth orbit.

The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 10:53 pm ET (0353 GMT Sunday) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral on Florida’s Atlantic coast, with a The autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule is called Endeavor.

A live webcast from NASA-SpaceX showed the 25-story rocket ship rising from the launch tower, its nine Merlin engines roaring into action amid billowing clouds of steam and red fireballs lighting up the night sky.

The four astronauts are scheduled to arrive at the space station early Tuesday after a 16-hour flight to dock with the orbiting laboratory about 250 miles (420 kilometers) above Earth.

The mission, named Crew 8, marks the first time that SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by billionaire Elon Musk in 2002 and based near Los Angeles, has launched U.S. astronauts into orbit in May 2020. Since then, NASA has carried out its eighth long-term mission to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle.

The newest ISS crew is led by mission commander Matthew Dominic (42), a U.S. Navy test pilot on the first trip to space, and veteran NASA astronaut Michael Barratt (64). He has flown to the International Space Station twice and conducted two spacewalks. Bharat served as the mission pilot.

Members of the team include NASA astronauts Jeanette Epps, 53, an aerospace engineer and former CIA technical intelligence officer; Alexander Grebenkin, a former military aircraft engineer. He, like Epps and Dominic, is an aerospace rookie.

Gray Benkin is the latest astronaut to fly on a U.S. spacecraft under a ride-sharing agreement signed in 2022 between NASA and Roscosmos, even as tensions rise between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Astronaut 8 will be welcomed to the International Space Station by seven current astronauts – three Russians and the four crew members of Astronaut 7, two from NASA, one from Japan and one from Denmark . The Manned 7 team is expected to leave the space station and return to Earth a week after the arrival of Manned 8.

Crew 8 is expected to remain on the space station until the end of August, conducting a total of about 250 experiments in the orbiting platform’s microgravity environment.

About the length of a football field, the International Space Station is the largest man-made object in space and has been continuously operated by a U.S.-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

The outpost’s first hardware was launched 25 years ago. It was conceived in part as a multinational enterprise aimed at improving relations between Washington and Moscow after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War rivalry that led to the original U.S.-Soviet space race in the 1950s and 1960s.

NASA says it is committed to keeping the space station operational for at least another six years.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)