SpaceX rocketship launches 4 astronauts on Nasa mission

FLORIDA: Nasa and Elon Musk’s commercial rocket company SpaceX launched a new four-astronaut team on a flight to the International Space Station on Friday, the first crew ever propelled into orbit by a rocket booster recycled from a previous spaceflight. The company’s Crew Dragon capsule, Endeavour, streaked into the darkened pre-dawn sky atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as its nine Merlin engines roared to life at 5:49 am (0949 GMT) from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The blastoff was aired live on Nasa TV. The crew is due to arrive at the space station, which orbits some 400 km above Earth, early on Saturday following a flight of about 23 hours. Within 10 minutes of launch, the rocket’s second stage had delivered the crew capsule to Earth orbit, travelling at nearly 17,000 miles per hour, according to launch commentators. The rocket’s first stage, meanwhile, descended back to Earth and touched down safely on a landing platform floating in the Atlantic on a drone ship affectionately named Of Course I Still Love You. The mission marks the second “operational” space station team to be launched by Nasa aboard a Dragon Crew capsule since the United States resumed flying astronauts into space from US soil last year, following a nine-year hiatus at the end of the US space shuttle programme in 2011. — Reuters