SpaceX Crew Dragon launch takes Russian cosmonaut, NASA crewmates on flight to space station

Despite deteriorating East-West relations, a Russian cosmonaut joined two NASA crewmates and a Japanese space veteran for launch aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Wednesday, kicking off a day-long flight to the International Space Station.

Wearing futuristic SpaceX pressure suits, Anna Kikina, Russia’s only active-duty female cosmonaut, Crew 5 Dragon commander Nicole Mann, pilot Josh Cassada and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center atop a Falcon 9 rocket at noon Eastern.

Vaulting skyward atop 1.7 million pounds of thrust, the Falcon 9 arced away to the northeast trailing a brilliant jet of flame from its nine first stage engines, smoothly accelerating as it consumed propellants and lost weight.

Nine minutes later, after dropping off its first stage for recovery on a landing barge, the Falcon 9’s upper stage was expected to release the Crew Dragon capsule in low-Earth orbit, kicking off a 29-hour rendezvous with the space station.

Mann, a Marine Corps colonel and F/A-18 carrier pilot, is the first Native American woman to be assigned to a spaceflight. Cassada holds a doctorate in high energy physics, is a captain in the Navy and an accomplished pilot in his own right. Wakata, who holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering, is making his fifth spaceflight with a combined 347 days in orbit.

The 38-year-old Kikina, like Mann and Cassada, is a space rookie, but like her U.S. crewmates, she’s had years of training while waiting for a flight assignment. A last-minute switch from an expected Soyuz flight to the Crew Dragon caught her by surprise.

“My leaders just appoint me and told me, do you want to be part of Crew 5?” Kikina told reporters, speaking in broken English. “Yes! Why not? But I was so surprised.”

If all goes well, Mann and Cassada will monitor an automated rendezvous and approach to the space station, moving in for docking at the lab’s forward port around 4:57 p.m. Thursday.

The launching Wednesday marked the eighth piloted flight of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, the 178th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket overall and the 44th so far this year. Kikina is the first Russian to fly aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon and the first to fly on a U.S. spacecraft of any type since two cosmonauts returned to Earth aboard the shuttle Endeavour in December 2002.

Kikina’s addition to Crew 5 was the result of a new agreement between NASA and the Russian space agency to resume launching U.S. astronauts aboard Soyuz spacecraft and to begin launching cosmonauts aboard American ferry ships.

The idea is to ensure at least one American and one Russian are always on board the space station even if a medical emergency or some other issue forces one country’s spacecraft to leave early, taking its crew along with it. 

William Harwood

Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News. He covered 129 space shuttle missions, every interplanetary flight since Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune and scores of commercial and military launches. Based at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Harwood is a devoted amateur astronomer and co-author of “Comm Check: The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia.”