After being postponed due to a hurricane and in times of the most severe international tensions, NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut launched from American soil to the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.
In the "Crew Dragon" of Elon Musk's private space company SpaceX, the so-called "Crew-5" flew on Wednesday from the Cape Canaveral cosmodrome in Florida.
Crew-5 consists of NASA astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann and her NASA colleague Josh Cassada, as well as Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina.
They should arrive at the ISS on Thursday, spend around five months on board the ISS and take care of numerous scientific experiments.
The Falcon 9 rocket stage landed in the Atlantic after launch on a ship named Just Read the Instructions.
As a zero-gravity mascot, "Crew-5" took an Albert Einstein toy into space.
The so-called zero-g indicators begin to float when the state of weightlessness is reached.
With Anna Kikina, a Russian crew member has flown into space from the USA for the first time in 20 years.
She is also the first member to fly a Crew Dragon.
Two weeks ago, the two Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin flew to the ISS together with NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, they had started on board a Soyuz capsule from the Russian cosmodrome Baikonur in the steppes of the Republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia.
Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti and NASA astronauts Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren and Jessica Watkins are currently on board the ISS.
The Russian invasion is adding to the strained relations between Moscow and Washington.
At times, the collaboration was on the brink.