NEW YORK, March 15. /TASS/. The US Crew Dragon spacecraft belonging to SpaceX with Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov as a member of the Crew-10 mission has taken off to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, with NASA's website broadcasting the launch.
The Falcon 9 vehicle carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft took off from the launch pad of the US Space Force base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 7:04 p.m. local time (11:04 p.m. GMT). Accompanying Peskov into orbit are NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, and Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
The spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Saturday evening. Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov and US astronauts Nick Hague, Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams are expected to leave the ISS aboard the Crew Dragon in mid-March.
Roscosmos and NASA have a seat-swap agreement for flights to the ISS. Under the deal, some US astronauts fly to the ISS aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, while some Russian cosmonauts fly on board America’s Crew Dragon capsules. Maxim Kharlamov, head of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, a subsidiary of Roscosmos, told TASS in January that the agreement was extended until the end of 2026.