NASA: SpaceX launches 8th crew for space mission – 03/04/2024 – Science

A SpaceX rocket took off from Florida (United States) early this Monday morning (4), taking three Americans and a Russian to the International Space Station (ISS). The astronauts will carry out a six-month scientific mission in Earth’s orbit.

The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule named Endeavor, launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, along Florida’s Atlantic coast, at 10:53 p.m. local time — and 0:53 am Brasília time.

A live NASA-SpaceX webcast showed the rocket rising from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared and a fireball lit up the 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 cockpit showing the four crew members side by side, dressed in their white and black flight suits with helmets.

“What an incredible journey to orbit,” said astronaut Matthew Dominick, 42, who is traveling to space for the first time, via radio, leading the mission. He is being accompanied by his compatriot Jeanette Epps and Russian Alexander Grebenkin, also a first-time spaceflight.

American doctor Michael Barratt completes the team as the only one in the group to have already visited the ISS.

The capsule that transports them, called Endeavour, has already been used four times by SpaceX.

The crew’s arrival at the space station is scheduled for early Tuesday (5), after a 16-hour flight. The spacecraft must dock with the orbital laboratory about 420 km above Earth.

Dubbed Crew 8, the mission marks the eighth long-duration ISS crew that NASA has flown aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle since the company, founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk and based near Los Angeles, began. sending US astronauts into orbit.

The crew is expected to remain on the space station until the end of August, carrying out around 250 experiments in the microgravity environment of the orbital platform.

NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos jointly operate the ISS. Currently, the space segment is one of the few areas in which cooperation between Washington and Moscow has been maintained after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

At the moment, seven people are on the ISS. Of them, they must return to Earth, after a period of exchange with the members of the new mission, an American, a Dane, a Japanese and a Russian.

ISS has been staffed on a permanent basis for 23 years. But the time since its construction has already shown its drawbacks. Recently, the director of the Station program at NASA, Joel Montalbano, said that they are closely monitoring a small leak in the Russian sector of the platform.