Nasa, SpaceX crew of four blast off to ISS

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, United States: NASA and SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft blasted off on Saturday carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station.

The Crew-7 mission is commanded by American Jasmin Moghbeli and includes Andreas Mogensen of Denmark, Satoshi Furukawa of Japan and Konstantin Borisov of Russia. The Dragon spacecraft carried by a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:27 am (0727 GMT) from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in front of around 10,000 people gathered to watch the launch. “We have liftoff!” NASA said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Cheers could be heard in the mission control room soon after the Dragon craft separated from the Falcon 9 rocket with the crew in orbit. “We may have four crew members on board from four different nations... but we’re a united team with a common mission,” Moghbeli said after the separation.

The launch was pushed back to Saturday to give engineers an extra day to review a component of the Crew Dragon capsule’s environmental control and life support system, NASA said in a blog post. It is the first space mission for both Moghbeli and Borisov. “This is something I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember,” said Moghbeli, a Naval test pilot, during a media call last month. Crew-7 is set to be the seventh routine mission to the orbital platform for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, with the first coming in 2020.

NASA pays SpaceX for the taxi service as part of a commercial crew program that it put in place to reduce dependency on Russian rockets for astronaut transport after the space shuttle program ended in 2011. Boeing is the other contracted private partner, but its program remains mired in delays and technical difficulties. It has not yet flown any crew.

Borisov will be the third Russian to fly on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, fixed atop a Falcon 9 rocket.