WASHINGTON (US) – Resilience, the spacecraft built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, docked with the International Space Station on Monday night. It carried four astronauts and it is the crewed mission of NASA on a privately built space capsule.
The Crew Dragon capsule had on board three Americans and one Japanese astronaut and it docked with ISS at 11:01 pm EST (4:01 GMT), 27 hours after being launched from Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
ISS, which is an orbiting space laboratory above the earth, will be the new home of the astronauts for the next six months. After that, they will be replaced by another set of astronauts on a Crew Dragon capsule. This schedule will go on until Boeing joins the programme with its own spacecraft next year.
The crew comprises Crew Dragon commander Mike Hopkins and fellow NASA astronauts mission pilot Victor Glover and physicist Shannon Walker. The other one is Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who is making his third trip to space. He flew in a US shuttle in 2005 and in Soyuz in 2009.
At ISS, there are two others as well – a US astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut – from an earlier mission.
“Welcome to the ISS. We can’t wait to have you onboard,” said Kate Rubins, the US astronaut, onboard the ISS.