After sending four astronauts into orbit, SpaceX makes its 101st consecutive landing

Enlarge / The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew-6 mission goes into orbit Thursday morning. Trevor Mahlman

A Falcon 9 rocket exploded into the starry sky over Florida early Thursday morning, sending four astronauts safely into low Earth orbit.

This mission, piloted by SpaceX for NASA, will take astronauts to the International Space Station after a 24.5-hour flight to synchronize with the laboratory in orbit. Meanwhile, in nominal operation, Dragon will fly fully autonomously.

SpaceX is performing its sixth operational manned spaceflight for NASA, and therefore this mission is named Crew-6. The Falcon 9 rocket's first stage, shiny and clean on the launch pad, was actually on its very first mission, but the Dragon spacecraft is making its fourth overall flight, the most times a Crew Dragon vehicle has flown into space. Previously, this dragon, named Endeavour, has flown NASA's Demo-2 and Crew-2 missions, as well as Axiom Space's Ax-1 private spaceflight to and from the International Space Station.

The perfect liftoff came after this rocket's launch was canceled two days earlier, on February 27, with only about two minutes remaining in the countdown due to a problem with the ignition system . NASA and SpaceX attributed the problem to a clogged filter in the ground systems that support the rocket until launch. Because of this problematic filter, the correct amount of TEA-TEB, a fluid used to ignite the rocket's Merlin 1D engines, was not reaching the first stage of the vehicle. SpaceX has replaced the filter and reset the countdown.

Thursday morning's flight carried NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen, the mission commander, and Warren "Woody" Hoburg, its pilot, as well as United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, both mission specialists.

Just before launch, Bowen addressed these words to the SpaceX launch team: "Again at the breach, folks. Crew-6 is ready for launch." Bowen was quoting Shakespeare's play "Henry V".

After the Falcon 9 rocket separated (with the second stage and Dragon engine heading into orbit), the first stage burned towards Earth. A few minutes later, he landed on the drone ship Just Read The Instructions.

Upon reaching orbit, Hoburg was clearly thrilled with the thrilling experience he had just had. "As a rookie pilot, it was a hell of a trip, thank you," he radioed SpaceX's flight control center. "I would say this is an absolute miracle of engineering and I feel so lucky to be able to fly this amazing machine."

Just over seven years have passed since the Falcon 9 rocket made its first successful landing on Earth. It was only the 20th launch of the Falcon 9 rocket by SpaceX. Monday morning's launch was the rocket's 207th overall flight. For a while after that first landing, SpaceX had several hiccups as it continued to experiment with landing on a drone ship, as well as having a few mishaps.

However, since a failed drone landing in February 2021, SpaceX has made 100 consecutive successful landings. Monday morning's return was unlucky. 101.