The traditional "walk-out": The suited crew waved to family and friends The crew's Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule left the pad at the Kennedy Space Center at 19:27 local time (00:27 GMT, Monday). It took 12 minutes for the Falcon to get the Dragon into the right part of the sky and drop it off. "Well done, that was one heck of a ride," crew commander Mike Hopkins radioed down to controllers. "Congratulations to everyone. Resilience is in orbit." "Resilience" is the name the astronauts have given their capsule. The ship will use its own thrusters to complete the rest of the journey up to the station. A docking with the orbiting platform is set for about 0400 GMT on Tuesday. Allow Twitter content? This article contains content provided by Twitter. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. You may want to read Twitter’s cookie policy A dramatic shot of the Merlin engines firing at the base of the Falcon rocket Nasa retired its winged space shuttles in 2011. In the intervening years, it's been buying seats for its astronauts on Russian Soyuz vehicles. This purchase option will now close in favour of the new American-sourced taxis. But US astronauts will continue to go to the station on Soyuz from time to time - it's just that no money will change hands. Instead, Russian cosmonauts will get flights in the American capsules in exchange. EPA Soichi Noguchi has now flown in a SpaceX Dragon, a Soyuz capsule and a space shuttle The new crew will have at least four spacewalks to perform in their time at the station. In one of those walks, they will install the first significant UK industrial contribution to the platform. This is the ColKa communications terminal. Made by MDA UK, the radio equipment will enable astronauts to connect with scientists and family on Earth at home broadband speeds. ColKa will be fixed to the exterior of Europe's ISS research module, Columbus. The UK participates on the station through its membership of the European Space Agency, an intergovernmental organisation that is a separate legal entity to the European Union. Will the UK have a seat on a space taxi? Libby Jackson, UK Space Agency The UK participates in the International Space Station, because the UK Space Agency exploration programme is part of the European Space Agency programme. We already have British scientists who are able to use the facilities on the ISS. And there are some experiments in development now to be carried out aboard the space station in the coming years. One, called the BioAsteroid project, run by the University of Edinburgh, will investigate how gravity affects the interaction between microbes and rock in reduced gravity. Astronauts on these space taxis will be taking these UK-led experiments to and from the space station. And much of the science can actually be operated remotely from the ground. We may well also see British astronauts flying on this vehicle in the future, too. ESA