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At noon on March 4 (Vietnam time), the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spacecraft Endeavour left the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center, carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
The Endeavour spacecraft was launched into orbit by a Falcon-9 rocket from space exploration company SpaceX.
Since 2020, SpaceX has been providing astronaut services to the ISS under NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The astronauts on the ISS in this Crew-8 mission are three American astronauts Matthew Dominick (commander of the ship), Jeanette Epps and Michael Barratt - an expert in aerospace medicine, and Russian astronaut Alexander Grebenkin.
The crew is expected to dock at the ISS after a 16-hour flight. During their 6-month stay on the ISS, the Crew-8 crew will conduct about 250 experiments in the microgravity environment of orbit, including using stem cells to create cell clusters (which can develop and grow in a 3D culture environment) to serve the purpose of studying degenerative diseases, taking advantage of the microgravity environment for 3D cell growth.
Crew-8 members will join the astronauts currently on the ISS, including three Russian cosmonauts and four astronauts from the Crew-7 mission. After about a week of handover, Crew-7 members (including two NASA astronauts, one Danish and one Japanese) will return to Earth on the Dragon spacecraft.
The ISS is designed to conduct experiments on the space environment and microgravity around the Earth at an average altitude of 400 km. About the length of a football field, the ISS is the largest man-made object in space. It takes only about 93 minutes for the ISS to orbit the Earth once, completing 15.5 orbits per day.
