Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center to begin the Ax-3 commercial crew mission. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)

For the third time, an all-private crew is heading for the International Space Station. The four-man team lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Thursday, kicking off a 36-hour pursuit of the orbiting research laboratory. Docking is scheduled for Saturday morning.

This two-week mission is managed by Houston-based Axiom Space, which is conducting private astronaut missions to the ISS as a stepping stone toward building a fully commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by the end of this decade.

Axiom's third mission, called Ax-3, launched at 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC) Thursday. The four astronauts were strapped into their seats inside SpaceX's Dragon Freedom spacecraft atop the Falcon 9 rocket. This is the 12th time SpaceX has launched a human spaceflight mission, and could be the first of five Dragon crew missions this year.

If, like us, you miss the darker, more adult-oriented Netflix Defenders series (Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Punisher), you'll be intrigued by the official trailer for Echo, which seems to be channeling some of the same gritty energy. In fact, it's the first Marvel project to earn a TV-MA rating and the first to feature a deaf protagonist. In other firsts, Marvel will drop all five episodes at once on both Disney and Hulu.

(Spoilers for Hawkeye below.)

We've already met Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox), aka Echo, in Hawkeye. She was the deaf commander of the Tracksuit Mafia, capable of perfectly copying another person's movements. And she was on a quest to discover the true identity of Ronin, the assassin who had killed her father. That put her on a collision course with Clint Barton/Hawkeye, who had hung up his Ronin gear for good.