The US space agency NASA launched the Crew-12 mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 5:15am EST from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.<\/p>\n
The pre-dawn launch was delayed by two days because of adverse weather forecasts across the US East Coast, including high winds that could have complicated emergency manoeuvres.<\/p>\n
The astronauts are expected to arrive at the orbiting ISS at about 3:15 pm on Saturday. They will spend nine months there.<\/p>\n
Crew-12 is composed of Americans Jessica Meir, the mission commander, and Jack Hathaway, the pilot, along with French astronaut Sophie Adenot<\/a> and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, a mission specialist.<\/p>\n They will replace Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January one month earlier than planned in the first medical evacuation in the space station\u2019s history.<\/p>\n The ISS, a scientific laboratory orbiting 400 kilometres above Earth, has since been staffed by a skeleton crew of three.<\/p>\n NASA declined to disclose details about the health issue that cut the mission short.<\/p>\n All systems are go as France zeros in on space ambitions<\/a><\/p>\n ‘One day that will be me’<\/p>\n Once the astronauts arrive, they will be among the last crews to live aboard the football field-sized space<\/a> station.<\/p>\n Continuously inhabited for the last quarter century, the ageing ISS is scheduled to be pushed into Earth\u2019s orbit before crashing into an isolated area of the Pacific Ocean in 2030.<\/p>\n Adenot, an astronaut at the European Space Agency<\/a>, will become the second French woman to fly to space, following in the footsteps of Claudie Haignere, who spent time on the Mir space station.<\/p>\n