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| The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft lifts off from pad 39A for the Crew-6 mission at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, early March 2, 2023. |
SpaceX launched its Crew Dragon capsule with four people aboard during a fiery nighttime launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The launch briefly turned night into day as the Falcon 9
rocket streaked over the Atlantic Ocean. It took nine minutes for the capsule
to reach 17,500 mph and escape the Earth's gravity. Over the next 24 hours, the
crew will chase the International Space Station with a scheduled docking at
1:17 a.m. ET Friday.
The previous launch attempt — on Monday — was scrubbed three
minutes before liftoff after a ground filter that pumps ignition fluid into the
rocket engines became clogged.
It's the fourth time this capsule, named Endeavor, has flown
to space and the fourth time it will visit the space station. This is the
seventh time SpaceX has launched NASA astronauts into orbit (and ninth overall
that it has sent people to space) since 2020.
The members of Crew-6 — two NASA astronauts, a Russian
cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates — will spend up to six
months on the space station conducting research and experiments. They'll
relieve the four people of the Crew-5 mission that arrived last October. That
team is set to return to Earth in about a week.
With the launch, there are now 14 people in space. Seven are
on the International Space Station, three are on the Tiangong space station and
four are in the Crew-6 capsule.