At 3:52 a.m. ET on April 27, NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti) was launched on a SpaceX new Crew Dragon spacecraft by a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center 39A launch pad in Florida to the International Space Station.
It was haynes and Watkins' first spaceflight and lindgren and Christopher's second.
Bob Haynes has served in the U.S. Air Force for more than 21 years, was named a research pilot at NASA's Johnson Space Center in 2012, and was an astronaut candidate in 2017, accumulating more than 3,500 hours of flight time on 50 different types of aircraft. Jessica Watkins, like Haynes, was a member of the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class.
Scheer Lindgren was inducted as a NASA astronaut in June 2009 and flew on an International Space Station mission in 2015, spending 141 days in space and completing two spacewalks. Samantha Christofredi was inducted as an astronaut of the European Space Agency in May 2009 and traveled to the International Space Station in 2014 to spend 200 days in space. In 2017, she and Matthias Maurer, an Astronaut from the European Space Agency who is currently aboard the Crew-3 mission on the space station, participated in lifesaving training at sea in Yantai, Shandong Province. A few days after the Crew-4 mission astronauts arrive at the space station, the crew-3 mission's four astronauts will leave the space station and return to Earth.
Launch live screen
Crew-4 mission astronauts will conduct more than 200 studies in the fields of materials science, health technology, plant science and other fields on the space station, including aging immune systems, concrete substitutes for organic materials, the cardiopulmonary effects of long-term exposure to microgravity environments, the use of artificial retinas to restore vision to patients with degenerative diseases of the retina, and will also use hydroponic and gasponic techniques to grow plants to provide larger-scale crop production for future space exploration.
Crew-4 astronauts will perform two spacewalks to continue preparing for the installation of new solar panels on the space station. During their stay at the Orbital Laboratory, they will also see the arrival of the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft and the Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft in the summer, and the crew-4 mission's four astronauts will return to Earth this fall.
This mission is SpaceX's seventh manned flight to date, followed by four trips to the International Space Station for NASA and two space tourism trips to and from nasa. The Falcon 9 rocket used in this launch is the fourth flight and landing, after the first stage booster flew SpaceX's 22nd commercial replenishment mission to the International Space Station in June 2021, the manned space mission Crew-3 in November 2021, which sent four astronauts to the space station, and the Turksat 5B communications satellite in December 2021.