Skip to main content

SpaceX Crew-4 astronauts are on their way to the space station

SpaceX’s Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) launched from Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39A at just after 3:50 a.m. ET (12:50 a.m. PT) on Wednesday, April 27.

NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines, and Jessica Watkins, along with Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency, are now on their way to the orbiting outpost with docking expected to take place on Wednesday evening. The crew will spend the next six months living and working aboard the station 250 miles above Earth.

Related Videos

As usual with SpaceX missions, the commercial spaceflight company livestreamed the early stages of the mission, including the rocket launch and the landing of the first-stage booster.

The launch lit up the night sky as SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket blasted skyward:

Liftoff of Falcon 9 and Dragon! pic.twitter.com/sfKAOpBtU6

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 27, 2022

Minutes after launch, the rocket’s first-stage booster made a successful landing on a droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Florida:

Falcon 9’s first stage booster has landed on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship pic.twitter.com/vaTkyWpCD5

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 27, 2022

Around 13 minutes into the mission, SpaceX also livestreamed footage from inside the astronauts’ Crew Dragon spacecraft:

Crew-4 on orbit pic.twitter.com/pNlRTTdSYE

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 27, 2022

This is SpaceX’s fifth crewed flight since the first one in the summer of 2020. The Crew-4 mission sees the first flight of this particular Dragon spacecraft and the fourth flight for Falcon 9’s first-stage booster, which previously launched the CRS-22, Crew-3, and Turksat 5B missions.

The ISS will be pretty crowded when the Crew-4 astronauts arrive later on Wednesday. While the station usually hosts around six visitors at a time, the crew will expand to 11 with the arrival of Crew-4. However, later this month, that number will reduce to seven as the Crew-3 astronauts return to Earth after a six-month stint in space.

For some insight into how astronauts live and work aboard the ISS, check out these videos made by visitors to the habitable satellite over the years.

Editors' Recommendations

NASA targets today for Crew-5 astronauts’ journey home
SpaceX's Crew-5 astronauts.

SpaceX’s Crew-5 astronauts are aiming to depart the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, bringing to an end a five-month stay aboard the facility.

The current plan is for NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, along with Japan’s Koichi Wakata and Russia’s Anna Kikina, to undock from the space station aboard their Crew Dragon spacecraft at 5:05 p.m. ET before splashing down at 9:25 p.m. ET on Friday, March 10.

Read more
Japan’s space agency destroys own rocket just after launch
Japan's H3 rocket at the start of a failed mission in March 2023.

Proving that rocket launches aren’t as easy as SpaceX makes them look, Japanese space agency JAXA was forced to destroy one of its own rockets after it developed a fault in the early stages of flight on Tuesday, March 7.

Mission personnel had no choice but to send a self-destruct command to the new H3 rocket after the second-stage engine malfunctioned just minutes after launch.

Read more
Satellites like SpaceX’s Starlink are disrupting Hubble observations
The curving light streak created by an artificial satellite mars an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers are once again worried about the effect that satellites like those used by SpaceX for its Starlink service will have on scientific research. A recent study looked at the effect that such satellites were having on observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and found that observations were already being impacted by the number of satellites nearby.

Telescopes like Hubble are particularly vulnerable to interference from satellites because of their location, in an area called low-Earth orbit (LEO). At less than 1,200 miles above the Earth's surface, this region is prime real estate for both scientific projects like Hubble and the International Space Station and for commercial projects like satellite megaconstellations.  While there have been satellites in this region for many years, recently the number of satellites has been rising dramatically, especially due to projects like Starlink which rely on having thousands of satellites in orbit.

Read more