The Falcon 9 spacecraft successfully lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The NASA mission, called SpaceX Crew-8 and composed of American astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps and Russian astronaut Alexander Grebenkin, is headed to the International Space Station and is scheduled to arrive Tuesday.
¡Despegue! 🚀
La nave espacial Dragon de @SpaceX se dirige a la @Space_Station, llevando a los astronautas de la NASA @dominickmatthew, Michael Barrat y @Astro_Jeanette, y al cosmonauta de Roscosmos Alexander Grebenkin. pic.twitter.com/vBOmDvg9Bg
— NASA en español (@NASA_es) March 4, 2024
NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free explained that this new mission will serve to continue acquiring knowledge about how human beings react biologically and psychologically during a long stay in space:
I want to personally thank the crew for their work and the sacrifice that they’ve made of their time to train and be ready for this mission. Crew-8’s mission will further the understanding of how humans learn and behave in space and how their bodies respond, and it’s all critical to our lunar exploration. We need all of these to come together to understand how people and technologies and systems will behave when we go on longer duration missions.
Crew-8 will remain in space until August
The four SpaceX Crew-8 astronauts will remain on the International Space Station for about five months. They will replace the four members of SpaceX Crew-7. However, both crews will live on the ISS for several days to carry out "handover activities" and for the new crew to learn and be aware of the advances made by their predecessors.
Falcon 9 launches Crew-8, Dragon’s 13th human spaceflight mission pic.twitter.com/iqOrDY2ENh
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 4, 2024
"We’ll have five dock days of Crew-8/Crew-7 handover activities, after which we’ll start watching weather and look for a landing opportunity for Crew-7. Crew-8 will stay onboard the International Space Station until mid-August, performing over 200 experiments in science and research, technology development, and commercialization of low-Earth orbit," said the director of the NASA program for the ISS, Joel Montalbano.
SpaceX Crew-8 is the eighth commercial mission carried out by NASA.
