SpaceX launches joint astronaut crew to ISS

An international crew of four astronauts has launched toward the International Space Station on Friday aboard a SpaceX rocket, embarking on a routine NASA mission that could be the first of many to last a couple months longer than usual.

The four-person crew - two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and Japanese astronaut - boarded SpaceX's Dragon capsule sitting atop its Falcon 9 rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Friday and beat gloomy weather to blast off at 11.43am local time. After a roughly 16 hour flight, they will arrive at the ISS.

While normal crew rotation missions last roughly six months, the Crew-11 crew may be the first to settle into a new routine time of eight months, intended to better align US mission schedules with Russia's missions, NASA said.

Over the next few months, NASA officials will monitor the health of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which remains docked to the ISS, before committing the mission to a full eight months.

Thursday's mission, called Crew-11, includes NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Michael Fincke, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platonov, and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui.

A previous attempt to launch on Thursday was scratched at the last minute because of bad weather.

A delegation of senior Russian space officials, including the head of Russia's space agency, Dmitry Bakanov, was in Florida for the launch attempt on Thursday, but it was unclear whether they stayed in town for Friday's launch.

Their visit on Thursday included the first face-to-face meeting between the heads of NASA and Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, since 2018. Roscosmos said Bakanov and acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy discussed continued ISS operations and cooperation on the moon.

The space cooperation is a bright spot in otherwise largely frosty US-Russia relations since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.