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SPACEX HAS LAUNCHED four astronauts to the International Space Station for Nasa, less than two days after completing a flight chartered by millionaires.
It is the first Nasa crew comprised equally of men and women, including the first black woman making a long-term spaceflight, Jessica Watkins.
“This is one of the most diversified, I think, crews that we’ve had in a really, really long time,” Nasa’s space operations mission chief Kathy Lueders said on the eve of launch.
The astronauts were due to arrive at the space station on Wednesday night, 16 hours after their pre-dawn lift-off from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
“Anyone who saw it realised what a beautiful launch it was,” Lueders told reporters.
After an express flight comparable to travelling from New York to Singapore, the crew will move in for a five-month stay.
SpaceX has now launched five crews for Nasa and two private trips in just under two years.
Elon Musk’s company is having an especially busy few weeks: it just finished taking three businessmen to and from the space station as Nasa’s first private guests.
A week after the new crew arrives, the three Americans and German they are replacing will return to Earth in their own SpaceX capsule.
Three Russians also live at the space station.
Both SpaceX and Nasa officials stressed they are taking it one step at a time to ensure safety.
The private mission that concluded on Monday encountered no major problems, they said, although high wind delayed the splashdown for a week.
SpaceX Launch Control wished the astronauts good luck and Godspeed moments before the Falcon rocket blasted off with the capsule, named Freedom by its crew.
“Our heartfelt thank you to every one of you that made this possible. Now let Falcon roar and Freedom ring,” radioed Nasa astronaut Kjell Lindgren, the commander.
Minutes later, their recycled booster had landed on an ocean platform and their capsule was safely orbiting Earth.
“It was a great ride,” he said.
The SpaceX capsules are fully automated – which opens the space gates to a broader clientele – and they are designed to accommodate a wider range of body sizes.
At the same time, Nasa and the European Space Agency have been pushing for more female astronauts.
While two black women visited the space station during the shuttle era, neither moved in for a lengthy stay.
Watkins, a geologist who is on Nasa’s shortlist for a moon-landing mission in the years ahead, sees her mission as “an important milestone, I think, both for the agency and for the country”.
She credits supportive family and mentors – including Mae Jemison, the first black woman in space in 1992 – for “ultimately being able to live my dream”.
Also cheering Watkins on was another geologist, Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon in 1972.
She invited the retired astronaut to the launch, along with his wife.
“We sort of consider ourselves the Jessica team,” he said, chuckling.
“Those of us who rode the Saturn V into space are a little bit jaded about the smaller rockets,” Schmitt said after the SpaceX lift-off.
“But still, it really was something and on board was a geologist … I hope it will stand her in good stead for being part of one of the Artemis crews that go to the moon.”
Like Watkins, Nasa astronaut and test pilot Bob Hines is making his first spaceflight.
It is the second visit for Lindgren, a physician, and the European Space Agency’s lone female astronaut, Samantha Cristoforetti, a former Italian air force fighter pilot.
Cristoforetti turned 45 yesterday, “so she really celebrates and is very happy with a big smile in the capsule”, said the European Space Agency’s director general Josef Aschbacher.
“She’s really a role model and she’s doing an enormously fabulous job on doing exactly that.”
The just-completed private flight was Nasa’s first dip into space tourism after years of opposition.
The space agency said the three people who paid $55 million (€52.1 million) each to visit the space station blended in while doing experiments and educational outreach.
They were accompanied by a former Nasa astronaut employed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which arranged the flight.
“The International Space Station is not a vacation spot. It’s not an amusement park. It is an international laboratory, and they absolutely understood and respected that purpose,” said Nasa flight director Zeb Scoville.
Nasa also hired Boeing to ferry astronauts after retiring the shuttles.
The company will take another shot next month at getting an empty crew capsule to the space station, after software and other problems fouled a 2019 test flight and prevented a redo last summer.
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Results are released in September! Norma Foley needs to resign, between this and the school bus fiasco she is abysmal at her job!
@John Long: it’s the junior cert , it really doesn’t matter
@Ciaran: The kids put the effort in. Should that be dismissed?
@Ciaran: except to the kids who did the exams
@John Long: Get over yourself, it’s the junior cert, an exam of no importance of any description.
@Ciaran: you seem to have the same attitude as the rest of the government. It really doesn’t matter!
@Justin Gillespie: No.
@Justin Gillespie: it is important as it’s basic requirement for apprenticeships.
@Justin Gillespie: I think it’s you that needs to get over yourself not every wants to go on to leaving cert so junior cert is very important to those that want to go for an apprenticeship instead.
@Bernard Mc Grath: you might be going over his head here. I doubt he even knows what apprenticeships are let alone their relation to the JC
@John Long: This is the SEC, not the DES. So, no matter what you think of Norma, this isn’t her fault.
@sean o’dhubhghaill: Her position is minister of education!
We keep forgetting that exam fees are paid for a product that has not been delivered in time. Maybe the State Exam commission should refund for being in default of an undertaking.
@Irish big fellow: There has been no exam fees for the last three years nearly because of Covid
Clearly gave this zero priority. Money on offer vs hours and expertise expected not attracting numbers needed, payment for those that do the job takes months to come through. Corrections completed long ago and yet results delayed and delayed and delayed. Ball dropped.
Junior cert provides valuable experience for future state exams, it important the results are released in a prompt manner as people who decided to drop out and take up an apprenticeship need them as it is a requirement for apprenticeships.
I don’t think it can be overstated how completely worthless it is as a learning aid to receive exam results 5 and a half months after the exam.
Students will already be neck deep in a new curriculum by then and preparing for christmas tests on that. They won’t even remember what the questions were in an exam so long and will have already made subject choice or higher level decisions already.
The whole thing is just an insult to students. Forced to sit a state exam the state has seemingly little interest in correcting. It should be a resigning matter for the Education minister but it’s Ireland and we’re used to tolerating less.
Correct me if I’m wrong; Teachers are paid 12 months of the year, yet are paid extra for correcting papers. How is it not a mandatory part of the job??
@El Grogan: Do you want LC exams to be marked by people who don’t want to mark it and who don’t care? What do you do with those, who make a pig’s ear if it? Do you take them off the job and pay them less? So the people who remain marking thw state exams get paid more? Oh, wait…………………..
@El Grogan: I had a similar conversation regarding the leaving cert results. From my understanding of what I got in reply, normal teachers don’t mark state exams, professional exam markers do. My point at the time was that I found this strange as teachers are paid over the marking period yet this is not part of their job. In France, for example, it is. Not all teachers are needed but each teacher chosen, gets a mail detailing what marking centre they are required to attend to mark papers. Exams end in early July and results are published near the end of July, despite the student population being much larger.
@David Stapleton: You can efficiently and accurately mark 25 exams per day. At 5 days a week over 3 weeks that is about 350+ exams per corrector.
Best of luck to all
The results are typically released mid September
I think the junior cert is pointless unless the person wants to leave school afterwards and get an apprenticeship. It’s alot of unnecessary pressure to put on a teenager if they go to do their leaving certificate because when you get that then the junior cert is nothing
@Anthony Hilton: look up the reason
I remember my first day in 4th year. “The junior cert meant sod all lads….the leaving cert will be 10 times as hard and you’ll have less time to learn it all as this is a doss year”
Where did all the examiners go?! 1 in 3 disappeared?
Was it down to the post-covid travel bottleneck or something else?
@Rachel Ray: the problem at the moment comes from two sources: dumbing down of educational standards, accompanied by students’ sense of entitlement. Who would want to involve themselves in a situation where everybody demands that they do well and if they don’t, go for rechecks. A neighbour of mine is a teacher and according to her the economic imperative to get as many people through education right up to college standard has created chaos since she is caught between retaining her own integrity re marking and giving in to economics that insist everybody must do well and then pay for the next stage of their education
@Rachel Ray: They made the perfectly rational decision that time with their families was more important than money, maybe?
have your say