Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was just launched into space with four people on board. It will be in space for six months.
The group took off in a space shuttle that Elon Musk’s SpaceX company had only used four times before. The trip’s goal is to do different scientific tests in space. One of these experiments will be to grow copies of human organs in low gravity, which isn’t possible on Earth.
NASA’s ISS Program manager, Joel Montalbano, says that more than 200 tests will be done during the six-month trip. There are people from both the United States and Russia on the crew, which shows that they are still working together to improve space exploration.
There were plans for the first launch to happen on Saturday, but high winds held it up. It was launched for real on Sunday, and the whole process was live-streamed. Matthew Dominick, who is in charge of the trip, said, “What an amazing ride to orbit.”
Matthew Dominick and Alexander Grebenkin, a Russian, are two of the four people on the team. This is their first trip into space. The crew members will move in with seven other people who already live on the International Space Station (ISS). They plan to touch down on the ISS on Tuesday. As of now, Grebenkin is the only Russian on board and the most recent astronaut to fly on a U.S. plane.
People built the International Space Station, which is about the length of a football field and circles the Earth as a center international station. The ISS has been taken care of by countries like the US, Russia, Japan, and 11 European countries.
