Guwahati News Desk: The private company of Elon Musk known as ‘SpaceX’ launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Wednesday night on the ‘Crew-3’ mission.
According to sources, the members took off on a Crew Dragon capsule fixed to a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
In addition, the successful launch was greeted by applause in the SpaceX control room.
Regarding the four members of the ‘Crew-3’ mission, they include of Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn of the United States and Matthias Maurer of Germany.
As per the reports, Chari, who is an US Air Force Colonel, is commanding the mission and is making his first trip to space along with Barron and Maurer.
Meanwhile, Marshburn is a medical doctor who flew aboard a Space Shuttle in 2009 and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in a mission from 2012-13.
Moreover, the quartet aims to spend six months on the orbital outpost, in order to conduct research to help inform future deep space exploration and benefit life on Earth.
The scientific highlights of the mission include an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth media, and another to build optical fibers in microgravity, which prior research has suggested will be superior in quality to those made on Earth.
Furthermore, the Crew-3 astronauts will conduct spacewalks to complete an upgrade of the station’s solar panels and will also be present for two tourism missions, including Japanese visitors aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft at the end of the year and the Space-X Axiom crew, set for launch in February 2022.
