SpaceX brings four astronauts to the ISS

The orbital outpost currently operates with only one NASA astronaut in the US segment to greet the incoming crew

SpaceX brings four astronauts to the ISS

The orbital outpost currently operates with only one NASA astronaut in the U.S. segment to greet the incoming crew after the astronauts from the previous Crew 2 mission splashed in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday evening.

Crew-3s Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn from the United States and Matthias Maurer from Germany are at 9:03 p.m. local time (0203 GMT Thursday) from the Kennedy Space Center on board a Crew Dragon capsule attached to a Falcon 9- Missile was attached, blasted off in Florida. The launch was greeted with applause in the SpaceX control room.

The spacecraft, named Endurance, will dock with the ISS on Thursday at 7:10 p.m. (Friday 00:00 GMT).

Marshburn, a doctor, flew aboard a space shuttle and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on a mission from 2012 to 2013 in 2009.

Barron, who was selected for the NASA astronaut corps along with Chari in 2017, the most recent recruitment, previously served as a submarine war officer in the Navy, while Maurer, a materials science engineer, becomes the 12th German in the cosmos.

Crew-3 is part of NASA's multi-billion dollar partnership with SpaceX, signed after the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, and aims to restore US capacity to conduct manned spaceflight.

NASA chief Bill Nelson said he would attend the launch on Wednesday.

The quartet will spend six months on the orbital outpost doing research to inform future space exploration and promote life on earth.

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 previous research has suggested will be superior to those on Earth.

Scientific highlights of the mission include an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth media, and another to build glass fibers in microgravity, which previous research has suggested will be superior to those on Earth.