October 10, 2022: -On Wednesday, SpaceX launched four people to the International Space Station from Florida, as Elon Musk’s company is keeping up a steady pace of crewed missions. Crew-5, the mission for NASA, brought the group up to the ISS for a six-month stay in orbit. The task is SpaceX’s fifth operational crew launch for NASA and the company’s eighth human spaceflight in just over two years.
“That was a ride uphill,” NASA astronaut and Crew-5 commander Nicole Mann added after the spacecraft achieved orbit, adding, “you got three rookies that are pretty happy to be floating in space right now.”
Crew-5 got off the ground after midday ET, beginning an estimated 29-hour journey to dock with the ISS. The mission is bringing the number of astronauts SpaceX has launched to 30, including government and personal missions, since its crewed launch in May 2020.
SpaceX launches the astronauts in its Crew Dragon capsule, Endurance, on top of a Falcon 9 missile. The rocket and capsule are reusable.
Endurance flies to space for a second time, retaining flown the Crew-3 mission to and from the ISS the previous year.
Crew-5 carries four astronauts two American, one Japanese, and one Russian, NASA astronauts Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina.
NASA is creating a “seat swap” agreement with Roscosmos to fly Kikina, making her the first Russian cosmonaut to fly with SpaceX and launch on a U.S. spacecraft since 2002.
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SpaceX was being its Team Dragon spacecraft and fine-tuned its Falcon 9 rocket under NASA’s competitive Commercial Crew program, competing against Boeing’s Starliner tablet. But Boeing’s capsule remains in development, with delays pushing back the start of operational Starliner aviation.
On Wednesday, NASA’s astronauts flying were reassigned from Boeing to SpaceX in a periodic move by the space agency in the previous year.
SpaceX has won contracts for 14 NASA crew missions, to Boeing’s six.
