The nine engines of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket roared to life at 12:34 a.m ET, lighting up the Florida sky and launching the multinational crew on a 25-hour trip to the International Space Station.
An attempt to launch this mission earlier this week was waived off when mission managers discovered an issue with the rocket’s ignition system.
That problem was resolved and the crew successfully blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Shortly after liftoff, the first stage booster of the rocket landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
The crew will dock with the station Friday at 1:17 a.m. ET.
Once at the station, the members of the Crew-6 mission -- two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates -- will spend up to six months on the I.S.S. conducting research and experiments.
They’ll relieve the four people of the Crew-5 mission which arrived last October. That team is set to return to Earth in about a week.
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