The historic NASA and SpaceX mission took off for the ISS



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A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon capsule with four astronauts inside took off successfully this Sunday towards the International Space Station (ISS) from the Kenndy Space Center, in Florida (USA), and at the scheduled time (21:27 Chilean time), a milestone for NASA and the private company Spacex for their future space missions.

The capsule, dubbed Resilience for this mission and which should arrive at the ISS shortly before midnight on Monday, is the first manned mission operated by Elon Musk’s company and the US aerospace agency that leaves from US soil.

The astronauts of what is the first manned operational mission of the Dragon capsule to the ISS, the Americans Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover, and the Japanese Soichi Noguchi, They headed for Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center at about 4 p.m. local time, as scheduled.

Crew-1 was scheduled to take off Saturday night, but NASA and SpaceX decided to postpone the launch due to bad weather. after the passage this week of tropical phenomenon Eta, which after hitting Central America crossed north Florida before continuing into the Atlantic.

According to the mission managers, the weather conditions did not offer guarantees that the maritime platform that should receive the Falcon 9 rocket will reach its position in the Atlantic Ocean.

Part of the rocket is scheduled to be used again in the next manned mission to NASA’s space station and SpaceX in March.

Once separated from the rocket, the Dragon capsule, dubbed Resilience for this mission, will arrive at the EEI at around 11:00 p.m. local time on Monday (01:00 Chilean time on Tuesday), where the astronauts They will be greeted by Kate Rubins, from NASA, and Russians Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.

This is the first of at least six missions that SpaceX will conduct to the ISS based on a 2.6 billion dollar contract signed with NASA in 2014, which includes manned and other cargo flights.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Friday that the ultimate goal of missions like Crew-1 is “to have more resources to do things that there is not yet a commercial market for, like going to the Moon and Mars under the sun. Artemis program “.



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