A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule has arrived
safely at the International Space Station (ISS),
carrying two USglo astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and a United
Arab Emirates astronaut to begin a six-month science mission.
The autonomously flying spacecraft dubbed Endeavour docked
to the space station shortly after 1:40 a.m. EST (0640 GMT) on
Friday, nearly 25 hours after launching from NASA’s Kennedy
Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The coupling was confirmed as the ISS and capsule flew in
tandem at 17,500 miles per hour (28,164 kph) some 250 miles (240
km) above Earth across the coast of East Africa, according to a
live NASA webcast of the rendezvous.
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SpaceX launches US, Russia, UAE astronauts to orbit for NASA
Paving the way for moon and mars expeditions
Some of the research will help pave the way for future
long-duration human expeditions to the Moon and beyond under
NASA’s Artemis program, its successor to Apollo, the US space
agency said.
The ISS crew also is responsible for performing maintenance
and repairs aboard the station, and to prepare for the arrival
and departure of other astronauts and cargo payloads.
Designated Crew 6, the mission marks the sixth long-duration
ISS team that SpaceX has flown for NASA since the private rocket
venture founded by billionaire Elon Musk began sending American
astronauts to orbit in May 2020.
Musk is CEO of electric car
maker Tesla and social media platform Twitter.
The latest crew was led by Stephen Bowen, 59, a onetime US
Navy submarine officer who has logged more than 40 days in orbit
as a veteran of three Space Shuttle flights and seven
spacewalks.
Fellow NASA astronaut Warren “Woody” Hoburg, 37, an
electrical engineer, computer science expert and commercial
aviator designated, was making his first spaceflight.
The Crew 6 mission also was notable for its inclusion of UAE
astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, 41, the second person from his
country to fly to space and the first to launch from US soil
as part of a long-duration space station team.
Rounding out the four-man Crew 6 was Russian cosmonaut
Andrey Fedyaev, 42, who like Alneyadi is an engineer and
spaceflight rookie designated as a mission specialist for the
team.
Fedyaev is the second cosmonaut to fly aboard an American
spacecraft under a renewed ride-sharing deal signed in July by
NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, despite heightened
tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine.
On arrival, the crew prepared to conduct a series of
standard leak checks and to pressurize the passageway between
the capsule and the ISS before they can open the hatch to the
interior of the space station.
Those seven are expected to end their mission and depart the space station this month. Four will return in the SpaceX Dragon they rode to orbit in October, and three others will ride home in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft flown empty to the ISS last week to replace one that sprang a coolant leak while docked to the station in December.
READ MORE: Space 2.0: Developing nations lead the race for the final frontier
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