BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. – With weather conditions dropping to 40% favorable seconds before lift-off, NASA and SpaceX were able to successfully launch their Crew-11 mission from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Friday’s second attempt followed a weather-related scrub on Thursday.
Minutes after the launch, SpaceX’s first-stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket returned to Landing Zone 1 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Just like members who made up Crew-10, the team consists of two NASA astronauts, a JAXA astronaut, and a Roscosmos cosmonaut.
Their SpaceX capsule should reach the orbiting lab this weekend and stay for at least six months.
Zena Cardman, a biologist and polar explorer who should have launched last year, was yanked along with another NASA crewmate to make room for Starliner’s star-crossed test pilots.
“I have no emotion but joy right now. That was absolutely transcendent. Ride of a lifetime,” she said after reaching orbit.
The botched Starliner demo forced Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to switch to SpaceX to get back from the space station more than nine months after departing on what should have been a weeklong trip.
[MORE: Meet the Crew-11 astronauts headed to the space station]
Crew-11 marks the 11th crew rotation mission of SpaceX’s human space transportation system and its 12th flight with astronauts, including the Demo-2 test flight, to the space station through NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Launch teams will hold a post-launch news conference at 1 p.m. on Friday.
News 6 will plan to stream coverage of the news conference live at the top of this story and on YouTube.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.