CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida, Feb 13 (Reuters) - A SpaceX rocket soared into orbit from Florida early on Friday with a crew of two U.S. NASA astronauts, a French astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut headed to the International Space Station for an eight-month science mission in microgravity.
The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule dubbed "Freedom", was launched from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, along Florida's Atlantic Coast, at about 5:15 a.m. EST (1015 GMT).
A live NASA-SpaceX webcast showed the 25-story-tall vehicle rising from the launch tower as its nine Merlin engines roared to life, gulping 700,000 gallons of fuel per second, emitting clouds of vapor and a reddish fireball that lit up the predawn sky.
'THAT WAS QUITE A RIDE'
Nine minutes into its flight, the Falcon 9's upper-stage rocket had accelerated to more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,360 kph) before thrusting the Crew Dragon into orbit. By then, the reusable lower-stage booster had flown itself back to Earth and touched down safely at a Cape Canaveral landing pad.
The four crew were set to reach the space station on Saturday afternoon after a 34-hour flight, docking with the orbiting laboratory platform some 250 miles (420 km) above Earth.
The mission, designated Crew-12, marks the 12th long-duration ISS team that NASA has flown aboard a SpaceX launch vehicle since the private rocket venture founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk began sending U.S. astronauts to orbit in May 2020.
Crew-12 was led by Jessica Meir, 48, a veteran astronaut and marine biologist on her second trip to the space station, nearly seven years after making history with NASA colleague Christina Koch by completing history's first all-female spacewalk.
"Thank you team, that was quite a ride," Meir radioed to the SpaceX flight control center near Los Angeles. "Crew-12 is grateful and ready for the journey ahead. We're on our way."
Joining her on the flight was Jack Hathaway, 43, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot and rookie astronaut; European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, 43, a master helicopter pilot from France; and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, a former military pilot on his second mission to the ISS.
ORBITING LABORATORY
Upon arrival, the team will get busy with a host of scientific, medical and technical research tasks in microgravity, according to NASA.
Those include studies of pneumonia-causing bacteria to improve treatments on Earth, and experiments with plant and nitrogen-fixing microbe interactions to boost food production in space.
Much of the science agenda is aimed at perfecting technologies that NASA hopes to deploy in future astronaut missions to the moon and Mars as part of its fledgling Artemis program, successor to project Apollo a half-century ago.
The Artemis II mission, a 10-day test voyage designed to fly four astronauts around the moon and back, is due to launch as early as next month.
Crew-12 will be welcomed aboard the space station by three current ISS occupants - NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev.
Four Crew-11 members who were supposed to have stayed aboard until the arrival of Crew-12 departed a few weeks early, when an undisclosed serious health condition affecting one forced an unprecedented medical evacuation flight home in mid-January.
The ISS, which spans the length of a football field and ranks as the largest human-made object in space, has been continuously operated by a U.S.-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
The first hardware for the outpost was launched more than a quarter century ago. It was conceived as part of a multinational venture to improve ties between Washington and Moscow following the Soviet Union's collapse and the end of Cold War rivalries that spurred the original U.S.-Soviet space race in the 1950s and 1960s.
NASA has said it is committed to keeping the space station operating until the end of 2030.
(Reporting by Steve Nesius in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Alex Richardson)
