A Russian cosmonaut and three American astronauts have left for the International Space Station (ISS). The team participating in the mission is scheduled to stay in Earth orbit for six months.
A SpaceX rocket took off with them from Florida on Sunday night local time.
The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket is attached to an autonomous Crew Dragon capsule known as Endeavour, which launched Sunday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.
It takes about 9 minutes for the capsule to stabilize in orbit before docking with the ISS.
Earlier on Saturday local time, the first attempt to launch the mission was suspended due to strong winds.
Despite tense relations between the United States and Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the incident marks a rare example of cooperation in space exploration between the two countries.
US-Russian crew Four crew members embarked on the Endeavor capsule, built by Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, which had been successfully launched four times before.
This is the first space mission for three of the four participating crews. The mission commander is 42-year-old Matthew Dominick, a former Navy pilot. Janet Epps, 53, previously worked at Ford Motor and the CIA.
Alexander Grebenkin (41) is a former military aeronautical engineer.
The most experienced crew member on the mission is 64-year-old Michael Barrett, who has previously visited the International Space Station twice and participated in two spacewalks.
They are expected to reach orbit on Tuesday.
They will replace a seven-person crew from the United States, Denmark, Japan, and Russia, four of whom will return to Earth after a few days of overlap.
The crew will experiment with creating organoids using stem cells to combat degenerative diseases.
There, they will take advantage of the microgravity environment to increase the capacity of three-dimensional cells, which is not possible on Earth.
