Video: Falcon 9 fires up engines for static fire test (members only)

One week after a Russian Soyuz spacecraft departed the International Space Station and brought three crew members back to Earth, another Soyuz carrying a veteran cosmonaut and a first-time NASA flight engineer is ready for launch Thursday on a quick four-orbit flight to the orbiting lab complex.

The stacking of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket this week at Cape Canaveral signals the start of a busy six-week campaign to ready ULA’s trusty workhorse launcher for its debut in a new human-rated configuration in mid-December.

The mission is a follow-on from NASA’s planetary defense mission, DART, which succeeded in changing the orbit of an asteroid around its larger neighbor. Liftoff happened at 10:52 a.m. EDT (1452 UTC).