CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA, Feb 13 (Reuters) – A SpaceX rocket entered orbit in Florida in the early hours of Friday with a crew made up of two American NASA astronauts, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut on their way to the International Space Station for an eight-month scientific mission in microgravity.
The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, carrying an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule called ‘Freedom,’ launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Florida’s Atlantic coast at about 5:15 a.m. Eastern Time.
A NASA-SpaceX livestream showed the 25-story-tall vehicle rising from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared, consuming 700,000 gallons of fuel per second, emitting plumes of steam and a reddish fireball that lit up the pre-dawn sky.
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“IT WAS SUCH A TRIP”
Nine minutes into the flight, the Falcon 9’s upper stage rocket accelerated to more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,360 km/h) before propelling the Crew Dragon into orbit. By this time, the reusable lower-stage booster had already returned to Earth and landed safely on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral.
The four crew members were due to arrive at the space station on Saturday afternoon, after a 34-hour flight, docking at the orbital laboratory platform around 420km above Earth.
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The mission, designated Crew-12, marks the 12th long-duration ISS crew NASA has sent aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle since the private rocket company founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk began sending American astronauts into orbit in May 2020.
Crew-12 was led by Jessica Meir, 48, a veteran astronaut and marine biologist on her second trip to the space station, almost seven years after making history with her NASA colleague Christina Koch by completing the first all-female spacewalk in history.
Joining her on the flight was Jack Hathaway, 43, a former United States Navy fighter pilot and rookie astronaut; European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, 43, a master helicopter pilot from France; and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, a former military pilot on his second mission to the ISS.
Upon arrival, the team will undertake a series of scientific, medical and technical research tasks in microgravity, according to NASA.
These include studies on pneumonia-causing bacteria to improve treatments on Earth and experiments with interactions between plants and nitrogen-fixing microbes to increase food production in space.
Much of the scientific agenda aims to improve technologies that NASA hopes to deploy in future manned missions to the Moon and Mars, as part of its new Artemis program, successor to the Apollo project half a century ago.
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(Reporting by Steve Nesius in Cape Canaveral, Florida)
