The Falcon 9 heavy rocket with the Crew Dragon spacecraft from the site at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida launched to the International Space Station (ISS). The broadcast on Twitter is conducted by SpaceX.
On board the spacecraft are astronauts Robert Shane Kimbrough, Megan MacArthur (USA), Tom Pesquet (France) and Akihiko Hoshide (Japan). This mission was the second regular one for Crew Dragon.
According to SpaceX, after launch, the first stage of the Falcon 9 [...] successfully landed on the platform Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic Ocean. The company's message emphasizes that SpaceX has retained the first stage of the rocket used for the orbital launch for the 80th time.
In March Interfax, citing the head of the Cosmonaut Training Center, Pavel Vlasov, reported that Russian cosmonaut Sergei Korsakov may go to the International Space Station (ISS) in the Crew Dragon in the near future.
In May 2020, a test launch of the Falcon 9 heavy rocket with the Crew Dragon spacecraft with American astronauts on board to the ISS took place. The previous time the United States independently delivered people to low-Earth orbit was on July 8, 2011, when the reusable manned spacecraft Atlantis of the Space Shuttle program was launched. After that, the US used Russian Soyuz-series ships to send people to the ISS.
Ivan Potapov
