ISS crew blasts off from Florida on SpaceX mission

Four new crew members for the International Space Station blasted off Thursday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, for a mission expected to last about six months.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew-13 team lifted off at 11:10 am local time, or 1510 GMT. The crew members are Americans Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Joshua Kutryk and Russian Sergey Teteryatnikov.

NASA expected their Dragon spacecraft to reach the ISS in about eight hours, which would make it the shortest such trip for a US vessel. The journey time depends on the distance between the station and the spacecraft at launch. The previous crew launched from American soil took more than 30 hours to reach the station.

Crew-13 had initially been due to arrive in mid-September, but the launch was postponed because of a leak aboard the Dragon.

The new crew 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, depending on weather conditions.

The ISS has been continuously inhabited for the last quarter-century and is scheduled to be pushed out of orbit before crashing into an ocean around 2030.