STORY: A SpaceX rocket soared into orbit Friday, with a crew of four – including two U.S. astronauts – kicking off an eight-month science mission in microgravity.<\/p>\n
\n A fireball lit up the predawn sky after the two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, topped with an autonomously operated Crew Dragon capsule dubbed “Freedom,” was launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral.<\/p>\n
\n Nine minutes into its flight, the Falcon 9’s upper-stage rocket had accelerated to more than 17,000 miles per hour before thrusting the Crew Dragon into orbit. By then, the reusable lower-stage booster had flown itself back to Earth.<\/p>\n
\n The crew includes NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, a veteran astronaut and marine biologist, as well as Jack Hathaway, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot and rookie astronaut.<\/p>\n
\n French astronaut Sophie Adenot and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev were also aboard.<\/p>\n
\n They were set to reach the International Space Station Saturday afternoon after a 34-hour flight.<\/p>\n
\n According to NASA, the team will get busy with scientific, medical and technical research in microgravity.<\/p>\n
\n Their work includes studies of pneumonia-causing bacteria to improve treatments on Earth, and experiments with plant and nitrogen-fixing microbe interactions to boost food production in space.<\/p>\n
\n Much of the science agenda is aimed at perfecting technologies that NASA hopes to deploy in future astronaut missions to the moon and Mars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"STORY: A SpaceX rocket soared into orbit Friday, with a crew of four – including two U.S. astronauts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47242,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,100,66],"class_list":["post-473156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-markets","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473156\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}