CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — NASA retiree turned private astronaut Peggy Whitson was launched on the fifth flight to orbit of her career early on Wednesday, joined by crewmates from India, Poland and Hungary heading for their countries’ first visit to the International Space Station.
The astronaut team lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at about 2:30 a.m. EDT, beginning the latest mission organized by Texas-based startup Axiom Space in partnership with Elon Musk’s rocket venture SpaceX.
The four-member crew was carried aloft on a towering SpaceX launch vehicle consisting of a Crew Dragon capsule perched atop a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket.
Live video showed the towering spacecraft streaking into the night sky over Florida’s Atlantic coast trailed by a brilliant yellowish plume of fiery exhaust.
Cameras inside the crew compartment beamed footage of the four astronauts strapped into their pressurized cabin, seated calmly side by side in helmeted white-and-black flight suits as their spacecraft soared toward space.
“We’ve had an incredible ride uphill,” Whitson radioed back to the SpaceX mission control near Los Angeles as Falcon’s upper stage delivered the crew capsule to its preliminary orbit about nine minutes after launch.
Dubbed “Grace” by the Axiom crew, the newly built Crew Dragon launched on Wednesday was making its debut flight as the fifth vehicle of its kind in the SpaceX capsule fleet.
It also marked the first Crew Dragon flight since Musk briefly threatened to decommission the spacecraft after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cancel Musk’s government contracts in a high-profile political feud earlier this month.
Axiom 4’s autonomously operated Crew Dragon was expected to reach the ISS after a flight of about 28 hours, then dock with the outpost as the two vehicles soar together in orbit some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
If all goes according to plan, the Axiom 4 crew will be welcomed aboard the orbiting space laboratory Thursday morning by its seven current resident occupants — three astronauts from the U.S., one from Japan and three cosmonauts from Russia.