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WASHINGTON — SpaceX launched a Crew Dragon spacecraft on a private astronaut mission to the International Space Station June 25 after weeks of delays.
A Falcon 9 lifted off at 2:31 a.m. Eastern from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A. The Crew Dragon spacecraft deployed from the upper stage in low Earth orbit nearly 10 minutes later. The Falcon 9’s first stage returned to land at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral.
The Dragon is scheduled to dock with the International Space Station at 7 a.m. Eastern June 26. It will remain there for about two weeks.
The Ax-4 mission for Axiom Space is commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, making her fifth trip to space after three long-duration missions for NASA and the Ax-2 mission for Axiom in 2023.
Also on board are Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, serving as pilot, and mission specialists Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland and Tibor Kapu of Hungary. All three are the second representing their respective nations to go to orbit. The European Space Agency is supporting Uznański-Wiśniewski’s flight to the ISS, as it did with Swedish astronaut Marcus Wandt on Ax-3 last year.
The launch ended a series of delays that pushed back the mission from the spring. In February, NASA and SpaceX agreed to swap the Crew Dragon Endurance, originally assigned to Ax-4, with a new Crew Dragon so that Endurance could be used for the Crew-10 mission to the ISS. That swap would keep Crew-10 on track for a launch in March after delays in the completion of the new Dragon, but would delay Ax-4.
Ax-4 was then planned for late May, then moved to early June to complete work on the Dragon. After weather-related delays, SpaceX postponed a June 11 launch to fix a liquid oxygen leak in the Falcon 9 booster.
Before the launch was formally rescheduled, NASA announced June 12 it was postponing the launch after detecting a “new pressure signature” in the ISS after work by Russian cosmonauts to fix a small, but long-running, air leak in a portion of the Zvezda module. That work appeared to fix the leak, but NASA said it wanted to determine if instead air was leaking through a seal in a hatch. NASA gave the go-ahead to proceed with the launch late June 23 without disclosing the outcome of the air leak review.
The Ax-4 crew will perform about 60 scientific experiments while on the station, the most to date of an Axiom mission. That includes joint activities by NASA and the Indian space agency ISRO involving Shukla and NASA astronauts on the station.
The crew also had another responsibility. As the first to fly on this Dragon, the fifth and final Crew Dragon built by SpaceX, they were given the honor of naming the spacecraft. As the Dragon separated from the upper stage, Whitson announced the spacecraft’s new name: Grace.
“Grace is more than a name. It reflects the elegance with which we move through space against the backdrop of Earth,” she said. “Grace reminds us that spaceflight is not just a feat of engineering but an act of goodwill for the benefit of every human everywhere.”
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