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NEW YORK, November 16. / TAX /. The Crew Dragon spacecraft piloted by US SpaceX with four astronauts on board was launched on Sunday against the International Space Station (ISS). Live coverage is provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) website.
The Falcon 9 launch vehicle took off at 7:27 pm Eastern Standard Time (03:27 am Moscow time) from Cape Canaveral. The crew dubbed Resilience includes NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission specialist Soichi Noguchi.
After about nine minutes, the first stage of the missile carrier automatically landed on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” in the Atlantic Ocean. 12 minutes after launch, the spacecraft entered Earth’s orbit.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft will dock with the ISS at 11pm Eastern Standard Time on Monday (7am Moscow time, Tuesday). The crew will spend six months at the ISS. Currently, the ISS crew includes Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, as well as NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubins.
The launch had been postponed from November 14 to November 15 due to adverse weather conditions. On Sunday, during preparations for launch, SpaceX experts discovered a small air leak that was eliminated by repeatedly opening and closing the hatch and removing small debris from the seal.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft’s first manned mission was conducted this year by astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken. The spacecraft entered Earth’s orbit on May 30 and automatically docked with the ISS on May 31. Hurley and Behnken nicknamed it Endeavor after their first space shuttle. The launch of the Crew Dragon became the first manned flight in nine years from US territory aboard a US spacecraft. NASA halted manned flights in 2011 after the end of the Space Shuttle program. Subsequently, all astronauts were delivered to the ISS and back from the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
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