Full crew of astronauts on SpaceX capsule docks with International Space Station

A SpaceX Crew Dragon carrying four astronauts docked with the International Space Station on Monday, the first of what the US hopes will be many routine missions.

Issued on: 17/11/2020 - 05:23

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, topped with the Crew Dragon capsule, is launched carrying four astronauts on the first operational NASA commercial crew mission at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, US on November 15, 2020. © Joe Skipper, Reuters

Text by: FRANCE 24 Follow

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"Soft capture" – the first part of the docking procedure – was completed at 11:01 pm (0401 GMT Tuesday), with the second part of the procedure set to happen a few minutes later.

After launching at 7:27 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday (0027 GMT on Monday) atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, three US astronauts and one Japanese astronaut awoke at noon (1700 GMT) on Monday from their scheduled eight-hour sleep in low-Earth orbit to the hit 1980s song "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins.

"We hope you enjoyed your first night aboard Dragon," SpaceX flight controller Jay Aranha told Crew Dragon commander Mike Hopkins, speaking on a line from the company’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters.

“It was a very nice night onboard Resilience,” Hopkins replied from the capsule, traveling in orbit at roughly 17,500 miles (28,160 km) per hour.

The gumdrop-shaped space capsule, which the astronauts named Resilience in a nod to the coronavirus pandemic, was scheduled to dock at 11 p.m. Monday (0400 GMT on Tuesday) at the space station, an orbital laboratory some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth where another US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts were awaiting their arrival.

The Resilience crew includes Hopkins, an Air Force colonel, and two fellow National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronauts: mission pilot Victor Glover and physicist Shannon Walker. They are joined by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, making his third trip to space after previously flying on the U.S. shuttle in 2005 and Soyuz in 2009.

Before receiving its flight certification from NASA last week, SpaceX's Crew Dragon had been under development for roughly a decade under a public-private NASA program started in 2011 to revive the agency’s human spaceflight capability.

Sunday night’s launch marked SpaceX’s first operational mission for NASA under that program, after the rocket company launched and returned an initial test crew of two US astronauts to space last summer.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)