SpaceX sends first full team of astronauts to space

The Crew Dragon is expected to dock with the International Space Station at around 11 pm ET tomorrow.

Who else is on board the ISS: The four astronauts on board this mission — NASA's Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi with Japan's JAXA space agency — will join NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russia's Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who are already onboard the space station. They arrived aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft last month.

The mission ahead: Walker, Noguchi, Hopkins and Glover will spend about six months in space before returning to Earth in the same Crew Dragon vehicle they're on right now. The return trip will see the spacecraft carefully reenter Earth's atmosphere, deploy parachutes and splash down off the coast of Florida.

The mission control team in Hawthorne, California told the crew there was a hangup with Crew Dragon's thermal control system, which helps keep the spacecraft's cabin at normal temperatures.

There was an unusual pressure reading on one of the system's pumps. But it's not a huge deal – an automated system detected the problem and switch to a back-up pump, and the Crew Dragon spacecraft is still flying smoothly through orbit. The mission is proceeding as planned.

After liftoff, it will take 27 hours for the Crew Dragon spacecraft to maneuver its way to the International Space Station before docking around 11 pm ET tomorrow.

It's possible to make the trip in far less time, but it depends on the day: If the crew was able to launch yesterday, they could have made the trek in around eight and a half hours.

Why the big time difference? The timing of today's takeoff and the ISS's position in orbit means this trip will have to take longer than nine hours. And when that happens, NASA makes sure to extend the trip to allow the crew enough time to catch some sleep on board the spacecraft. That's to ensure they're fully alert when it comes time to dock with the space station.

And yes, the Crew Dragon capsule has a bathroom on board.

The Crew Dragon capsule, carrying four astronauts, is now flying free through Earth's orbit. The capsule uses tiny thrusters to stay oriented and help steer the spacecraft toward the International Space Station.

It's a slow and precise journey that will take 27 hours. The capsule is expected to dock with the International Space Station tomorrow around 11 pm ET.

The first-stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, the largest part of the launch vehicle that houses the nine main engines, detached from the second stage of the rocket and made a pinpoint landing on a robotically-controlled seafaring platform, or droneship, in the Atlantic Ocean.

This is a routine feat for SpaceX. The company has recovered more than 60 of its first-stage rocket boosters after launch, allowing the company to refurbish the booster and use it again.

That saves the company some cash, SpaceX says.

The second stage of the rocket has now fired up its engine, and it's working to propel the Crew Dragon capsule — carrying the four astronauts — to more than 17,000 miles per hour. That's the speed needed to keep an object in a stable orbit around the Earth.

The rocket just hit "MECO" – or main engine cutoff. That means the 9 Merlin engines attached to the rocket's first-stage, the ones that give the initial thrust at liftoff, are done burning fuel for now.

The first-stage of the rocket then broke off from the second-stage rocket, which has its own massive engine optimized for blasting through space where the atmosphere is super thin.

The second-stage lit its engine, and it's now powering the Crew Dragon capsule to higher and higher speed.

It'll need to hit at least 17,000 miles per hour to reach "orbital velocity." That essentially means the spacecraft will be traveling so fast, at just the right angle, that it'll begin to continuously fall around the earth — otherwise known as orbiting.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket just hit "Max-Q." That's the engineering term for when a launch vehicle reaches the highest aerodynamic pressure — and everything still appears to be going flawlessly.

The SpaceX 9 rocket fired up the nine engines at its base, and the rocket is now soaring toward outer space.

There are four astronauts on board —NASA's Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi with Japan's JAXA space agency — and they're headed for a six-month stay on the International Space Station.

Watch the moment:

The Crew Dragon is named "Resilience" in honor of the stressful time the world is enduring.

Astronaut Mike Hopkins continued that message, saying this to Mission Control just minutes before takeoff:

Watch the moment: