Cape Canaveral, Fla. — A rocket carrying four astronauts, including a Syracuse native, launched late Sunday evening to the International Space Station.
The team for the “Crew-8” mission blasted off at 10:53 p.m. in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida.
The crew is led by commander Matthew Dominick, alongside pilot Michael Barratt and mission specialist Jeanette Epps, who grew up in Syracuse. Also onboard is Alexander Grebenkin, a mission specialist from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.
They will spend six months on the station, conducting experiments that will give more information about the long-term effects of living in space.
The trip from Florida to the space station is expected to take about 28 hours, with the spacecraft set to dock at around 3 a.m. Tuesday. Two previous launch attempts had to be cancelled due to bad weather.
The crew almost faced another delay after a hairline crack was found on the crew capsule’s hatch, prompting a last-minute review by engineers.
A SpaceX official told the crew only 10 minutes before liftoff that it would be safe to fly to the space station and return. The extreme heat of returning through the Earth’s atmosphere is expected to cause the capsule to swell, causing the gap created by the crack to be filled, the official said.
Epps, 53, grew up on Syracuse’s South Side, graduating from Corcoran High School and Le Moyne College before heading to the University of Maryland for her doctorate. She was an engineer for Ford Motor Co. and worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency before becoming an astronaut.
Epps will be the second Black woman to live on the space station, and the sixth Black woman to fly into space. She said shortly after liftoff that she was “super excited” to be in space, and expressed gratitude for the people who helped her get there.
“Thank you for supporting me…
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