Four-member crew blasts off for International Space Station

Four new crew members for the International Space Station blasted off Thursday for the orbital laboratory where they will stay for approximately six months.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew-13 mission team lifted off at 11:10 am local time (1510 pm GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Americans Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Joshua Kutryk, and Russian Sergey Teteryatnikov were expected to reach the ISS aboard their Dragon spacecraft in about eight hours, according to NASA, which would make it the shortest such trip for a US vessel.

The duration of the journey depends greatly on the distance between the ISS and the spacecraft at the time of launch.

It took more than 30 hours for the last crew that launched from American soil to reach the station.

The new ISS crew was initially meant to arrive in mid-September, but its launch was postponed due to a leak aboard the Dragon.

Crew-13 will take over from Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Frenchwoman Sophie Adenot and Russian Andrey Fedyaev.

Crew-12 is set to return to Earth as early as Monday, though the schedule depends on weather conditions.

Canadian Kutryk will have an extra reason to look forward to his return in six months' time -- his wife is due to give birth during his stay in space.

Continuously inhabited for the last quarter-century, the aging ISS is scheduled to be pushed out of Earth's orbit before crashing into one of Earth's oceans sometime around 2030.

Despite many international cooperation agreements falling apart after Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022, the United States and other ISS partners have continued working with Russia on the space station.

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