SpaceX’s Crew-8 astronaut mission will arrive at the International Space Station early Tuesday morning (March 5), and you can watch the action live.
The four-person Crew-8 launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday (March 3) at 10:53 p.m. EST (0353 GMT on March 4).
The mission’s Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, is scheduled to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) Tuesday around 3 a.m. EST (0800 GMT). Watch the orbital rendezvous live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency. Coverage will begin at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT).
Read more: SpaceX Crew-8 astronaut mission: Live updates
Crew-8 is sending NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeannette Epps and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin to the orbiting lab for a six-month stay.
Dominick is Crew-8’s commander, Barrett is the pilot, and Epps and Grebenkin are mission specialists. Are all spaceflight rookies except Barratt, who already had two orbital missions under his belt before this one.
The quartet will relieve the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-7 mission, who arrived at the ISS in August 2023 and will head home to Earth no earlier than March 11.
The four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission pose for a crew photo on the access arm to their Dragon spacecraft ahead of their March 2, 2024 launch from NASA’s Pad 39A of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Image credit: SpaceX)
As its name suggests, Crew-8 is the eighth operational astronaut mission that SpaceX is flying to the ISS for NASA.
The agency signed a similar commercial-crew deal with aerospace giant Boeing, which aims to launch astronauts on its new Starliner capsule for the first time next month, on a trial mission called Crew Flight Test.
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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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