SpaceX launches its first female-led crewed mission to the ISS that also took a Russian cosmonaut to the orbiting ship amid global tensions over the war in Ukraine, Daily Mail reported.
According to detail, the Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina is one of the four Crew-5 members who launched aboard a SpaceX rocket to the ISS. She is the only Russian to launch an American rocket amid global tensions over the war in Ukraine and the first since 2002.
Kikina joins Nicole Aunapu Mann, the first indigenous woman to launch into space and the first female commander of a SpaceX Crew Dragon. NASA’s Josh Cassada and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Koichi Wakata are also part of Crew-5.
SpaceX’s 215-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine Merlin engines at 12:01 pm, generating about 1.7 million pounds of thrust and shot off toward space.
A high-ranking official of the Russian space agency Roscosmos said shortly after the launch that the flight marked “a new phase of our cooperation” with the U.S. space agency NASA.
At a post-launch NASA-SpaceX briefing on Wednesday, Sergei Krikalev, head of human spaceflight for Roscosmos, said the agency chief Yuri Borisov was seeking to ease tensions after Borisov’s predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin, raised questions about the future of the ISS partnership.
Krikalev cited bilateral teamwork in space dating back to the Apollo-Soyuz era in 1975, saying, “We started our cooperation many years ago, over 40 years ago, and will continue our cooperation as long as I can imagine.”
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The July crew-exchange deal paved the way for resuming routine joint U.S.-Russian flights to the ISS that had begun during the space shuttle era and continued after shuttles ceased flying in 2011. From then until SpaceX began offering crewed launch services nine years later, Soyuz was the only avenue to orbit for U.S. astronauts.
