SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft effectively docked with the International Space Station on Thursday evening, under 24 hours after it launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and Kayla Barron, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, will go through a half year at the ISS directing scientific research and monitoring the space station.
The Dragon spacecraft docked autonomously to the stations Harmony module at 6:32 p.m. also, opened that incubate around two hours after the fact after pressurization and leak checks.
Kayla Barron, a Navy lieutenant commander who was added to the trip in May, was the first NASA astronaut to advance into the station as mission control praised.
The team is joining three astronauts who are now on the space station two Russians and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to see these smiling faces. All seven of us are friends and we’re going to become even better friends as time goes on,” Vande Hei said during the welcome ceremony.
“It’s really an honor to be up here at the time when these folks arrived, to be able to help, not only to do science that’s going to help out humanity on earth right now, but also to help the human race be able to explore further and further away from our home planet.”
The launch was initially expected to launch on Halloween, yet was postponed by awful climate and an undisclosed medical issue with a crew member.
It denotes the fifth traveler trip for SpaceX, which was established by Elon Musk in 2002.
Wednesday’s launch carried the 600th person to ever reach orbit and comes only days after SpaceX returned four astronauts to Earth on Monday, stopping a 200-day mission at the space station.
