The “Cro-7” mission is led by the American Jasmine Mokbeli and includes the Danish Andreas Mogensen, the Japanese Satoshi Furukawa and the Russian Konstantin Borisov.
The vehicle was launched by a “Falcon-9” rocket at 03:27 (07:27 GMT) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in the southeastern United States, in the presence of about ten thousand people who gathered to attend the take-off.
“We have taken off!” NASA wrote on the X platform.
The take-off was postponed to Saturday to give engineers an extra day to examine a component of the Crew Dragon, NASA said in a blog post.
This is the first assignment for Mokbeli and Borisov.
Crew-7 is the seventh routine mission of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to the International Space Station. The first mission took place in 2020.
The mission crew will spend six months at the International Space Station, where they will conduct science experiments, including collecting samples during an exit into space, to see if the station releases microorganisms through the life-support system’s vents.
The goal is to see if these microorganisms can survive and reproduce in space.
The four astronauts will join a crew of seven on the station before the Crew-6 mission departs back to Earth a few days later.
© 2023 AFP
