Running a day late, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched Friday on a mission to deliver a fresh three-man one-woman crew to the International Space Station.
The Falcon 9 lifted off at 11:43 a.m. EDT from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as mission control kept a close eye on clouds rolling into the area shortly before launch time.
With commander Zena Cardman and co-pilot Mike Fincke monitoring cockpit displays, flanked on the left by Japanese Astronaut Kimiya Yui and on the right by cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, the Crew Dragon capsule began its climb. Nine minutes later, they reached orbit and set off after the International Space Station.
NASA TV 
“I have no emotions but joy right now. That was absolutely transcendent, the ride of a lifetime,” radioed Cardman, making her first flight. “Thank you, this has been an incredible honor.”
Added Fincke, a three-flight veteran: “Boy, it’s great to be back in orbit again! Thank you to SpaceX and NASA to get us here. What a ride!”
The crew originally hoped to take off Thursday, but clouds built up over the launch site and SpaceX called off the countdown just 67 seconds before liftoff. Weather remained a concern the second time around, but in the end conditions were “go” for launch.
Two-and-a-half minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9’s first stage engines shut down, the stage dropped away and the flight to orbit continued on the power of the single Merlin engine powering the Falcon 9’s second stage.
The booster, meanwhile, flipped around and reversed course, flying itself back to a picture-perfect touchdown on a landing pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, chalking up SpaceX’s 65th Florida landing and its 484th successful booster recovery overall.
One minute after landing, the second stage engine shut down and the Crew Dragon Endeavour was released to fly on its own.
Had the crew launched Thursday, it would have taken them nearly 40 hours to catch up with the space station. With a launch Friday, the trip was expected to take just 16 hours, setting up a docking at the forward Harmony module’s space-facing port at 3 a.m. Saturday — the same time they would have docked had they launched Thursday.
For Cardman, the trip to space finally fulfills a dream she had hoped to accomplish last year when she came within a month or so of launching to the space station as commander of an earlier Crew Dragon flight.
But she and Crew 9 crewmate Stephanie Wilson were bumped from the flight to free up two seats to bring Starliner astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and pilot Sunita Williams back to Earth after an extended stay in space.
NASA
Wilmore and Williams flew to the orbital lab complex in June 2024 in the first piloted flight of a Starliner. But their stay in space was extended because of Starliner propulsion system problems. NASA managers eventually opted to bring them down earlier this year aboard the Crew 9 Dragon, using the seats given up by Cardman and Wilson.
Wilson has not yet been assigned another flight, but Cardman was tapped to command of Crew 11.
“If I think about it only as an individual, and how it affected me, yes, of course, it was an unexpected change,” she said. “But space flight is not about me or about any individual. It’s about what we can do together. None of us can do this by ourselves.
“Now I have the opportunity to train with this wonderful, amazing crew. Life is a journey. It takes many turns, and I’m just grateful to be here.”
Fincke is a 58-year-old three-flight veteran who trained to fly aboard Boeing’s Starliner as did Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui. In the wake of the problems encountered last year during the Starliner test flight, both ended up assigned to Crew 11.
Platonov, making his first flight, was assigned to Crew 11 as part of a joint U.S.-Russian seat-swap program. The arrangement is intended to ensure at least one representative of each country is always on board the ISS even if one crew ferry ship has to depart in an emergency, taking all of its crew members with it.
Platonov is the seventh cosmonaut to fly aboard a Crew Dragon under the agreement.
A long-awaited mission aboard the space station
Crew 11 will be welcomed aboard the space station by by Crew 10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, Japanese station commander Takuya Onishi and cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, who were launched to the station on March 14. Also on hand: Soyuz MS-27/73S cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky along with NASA’s Jonny Kim, launched from Kazakhstan on April 8.
Clothing and personal items for Cardman are already on board, launched last year before her expected Crew 9 flight. Included in those personal items were birthday cards, including one from her father, a physicist, who passed away last August just before NASA bumped Cardman from Crew 9.
She will celebrate her next birthday, her 38th, in October.
“My parents knew that I would be on the space station for my birthday last year, we thought, so they sent a few items in advance so that I could feel at home while I was up there. And now I’ll have the chance to see them,” Cardman told CBS News.
“My whole history, the people who have brought me to where I am today, I think it’s going to feel really special to feel that connection to my dad, to my parents on my birthday in space.”
Cardman and her crewmates are replacing the Crew 10 fliers, who plan to undock Aug. 6, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean off the southern California coast to close out a 145-day mission. Highlights included a spacewalk by McClain and Ayers and a non-stop schedule of research and station maintenance.
“I’m kind of looking forward to doing nothing for a couple of days,” McClain joked when asked what she looked forward to the most about returning to Earth. Onishi said he was looking forward to seeing his family again, “and also taking a hot shower on the ground!”
NASA 
Added Ayers, who said she’ll miss the opportunity to photograph Earth from the vantage point of space: “In addition to what Anne and Tak said, I’m actually looking forward to a big, juicy burger on the beach.”
NASA plans to retire the space station in 2030, using a custom spacecraft being designed by SpaceX to drive the 930,000-pound football-field-size lab out of orbit, making sure it breaks up in the atmosphere over the southern Pacific Ocean, far from any populated areas.
As one might expect of a decades old spacecraft of the size and complexity of the International Space Station, the vehicle is showing signs of wear and tear. One of the more concerning issues is a small-but-persistent leak in a compartment between the Russian Zvezda module and its aft docking port.
The leak was discovered in 2019. The Russians believe its related to metal fatigue. NASA managers think it’s more complicated than that. In any case, cosmonauts aboard the station have made multiple attempts to plug the leaks, but they have persisted.
Earlier this summer, NASA held up the launch of the Axiom 4 flight to the space station due to indications a hatch used to seal off the leaking compartment was also leaking. They now have confirmed the hatch can, in fact, be sealed when needed to protect the integrity of the station’s primary air supply.
“The rest of the station is leak tight,” said Bill Spetch, NASA’s ISS integration operations manager. “We continuously monitor that, and everything else shows that we are really tight on our leak rate on the rest of ISS, no evidence of any other cracks or any other places.”
Said departing Crew 10 commander McClain: “We feel very safe.”
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