Four astronauts from an international crew launched from Florida to the International Space Station on Friday aboard a SpaceX rocket, departing despite gloomy weather on a routine NASA mission that may run several months longer than usual.
The four-person astronaut crew – two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut – boarded SpaceX’s Dragon capsule sitting atop its Falcon 9 rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and blasted off at 11:43 am ET (1543 GMT).
Zena Cardman, a biologist and polar explorer who should have launched last year, was yanked along with another NASA crewmate to make room for Starliner’s star-crossed test pilots.
“I have no emotion but joy right now. That was absolutely transcendent. Ride of a lifetime,” Cardman, the flight commander, said after reaching orbit.
The botched Starliner demo forced Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to switch to SpaceX to get back from the space station more than nine months after departing on what should have been a weeklong trip.
“Every astronaut wants to be in space. None of us wants to stay on the ground, but it’s not about me,” Cardman said before her flight.
NASA’s Mike Fincke – Cardman’s co-pilot – was the backup for Wilmore and Williams on Starliner, making those three still the only ones certified to fly it. Fincke and Japan’s Kimiya Yui, former military officers with previous spaceflight experience, were training for Starliner’s second astronaut mission. With Starliner grounded until 2026, NASA switched the two to the latest SpaceX flight.
“Boy, it’s great to be back in orbit again,” Fincke radioed. He last soared on NASA’s next-to-last space shuttle flight in 2011.
Rounding out the crew is Russia’s Oleg Platonov. The former fighter pilot was pulled a few years ago from the Russian Soyuz flight lineup because of an undisclosed health issue that he said has since been resolved.
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