After a series of SpaceX delays, Elon Musk's company launched four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) with the “Crew-3” mission.
The shuttle was launched at 3.03 am Italian from the Cape Canaveral base in Florida. The mission astronauts are Raja Chari, in command, pilot Tom Marshburn and mission specialist Kayla Barron, all three of NASA, plus mission specialist Matthias Maurer of the European Space Agency (ESA). The docking with the Space Station is expected at 13.10 today and the hatch will open about two hours later.
The orbital outpost is currently operational with a single US NASA astronaut to welcome the arriving crew after astronauts from the previous Crew-2 mission landed in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday.
The flight was postponed from October 31, first due to weather conditions, then due to a "medical problem" that affected one of the crew members.
Chari, a colonel of the US Air Force, commands the mission and makes his first journey into space, together with Barron and Maurer. Marshburn, a physician, flew aboard a space shuttle in 2009 and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on a 2012-13 mission.
Scientific highlights of the mission include an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth media and another to build optical fibers in microgravity, which previous research has suggested will be of higher quality than those produced on Earth. The
astronauts will also conduct spacewalks to complete an upgrade of the station's solar panels.
(Unioneonline / L)
