Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX was due to launch the next long-duration crew of the International Space Station into orbit on Wednesday, with a Russian cosmonaut hitching a ride with two Americans and a Japanese astronaut as part of the mission.
The SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Endurance, was set for liftoff at noon EDT from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The Crew-5 mission is also notable for the inclusion of Anna Kikina, 38, the lone female cosmonaut on active duty for the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and the only Russian yet to fly aboard an American spacecraft amid global tensions over the war in Ukraine. The last cosmonaut to ride a U.S. rocketship to orbit was in 2002 on a NASA space shuttle.
Commander Mann, 45, a U.S. Marine Corps colonel and a fighter pilot who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, holds an engineering masters degree specializing in fluid mechanics. Rounding out the crew from Japan's space agency JAXA is veteran astronaut Koichi Wakata, 59, a robotics expert making his fifth voyage to space.
ISS, the length of a football field and largest artificial object in space, has been continuously occupied since November 2000, operated by a U.S.-Russian-led consortium that includes Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
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