The rendezvous came about 21 hours after the team and its
capsule were launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space
Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Wednesday night, following a string of
weather delays that postponed the liftoff for a week and a half.
The docking took place about 6:30 p.m. EST (5am IST on
Friday) while the Crew Dragon vehicle, dubbed Endurance, and the space station
were flying about 260 miles (420 km) above the eastern Caribbean Sea, according
to NASA.
The Endurance crew consists of three American NASA
astronauts — flight commander Raja Chari, 44, mission pilot Tom Marshburn, 61,
and mission specialist Kayla Barron, 34 — as well as German astronaut Matthias
Maurer, 51, a mission specialist from the European Space Agency.
On arrival, the crew took inventory, conducted standard leak
checks and pressurized the space between the spacecraft in preparation for
opening the hatch to the space station about two hours later.
A live NASA video feed from the station showed the new
arrivals floating headfirst through a padded passageway from their capsule into
the orbiting outpost.
They were welcomed aboard with hugs from the three current
space station occupants - Russian cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Oleg Novitskiy
and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei, who shared a Soyuz flight with his Roscosmos
crewmates to the complex.
Astronaut wings
Endeavor's second-in-command, Marshburn — a medical doctor
and former NASA flight surgeon — has logged two previous spaceflights to the
space station and four spacewalks.
Maurer, a materials science engineer, was making his debut
spaceflight, as were Chari, a US Air Force combat jet and test pilot, and
Barron, a US Navy submarine officer and nuclear engineer. Shortly after coming
aboard, Marshburn pinned astronaut wings to the collars of his three rookie
colleagues amid handshakes and smiles.
Both Chari and Barron also are among the first group of 18
astronauts selected for NASA's upcoming Artemis missions, aimed at returning
humans to the moon later this decade, over a half century after the Apollo
lunar program ended.
"I think we all loved the ride up here," Chari
said during brief remarks in a welcoming ceremony webcast from the station.
"It was way smoother than we could have imagined."
The SpaceX Dragon also delivered more than 4,000 pounds
(1,800 kg) of hardware and research equipment, NASA said.
The crew arriving on Thursday was officially designated
"Crew 3" - the third full-fledged "operational" crew that
NASA and SpaceX have flown together to the space station after a two-astronaut
test run in May 2020.
"Crew 2" returned safely to Earth from the space
station on Monday with a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida that
capped a record 199 days in orbit.
SpaceX, the rocket company formed in 2002 by billionaire
Elon Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla, has logged a total of 15 human
spaceflights in 17 months, including its astro-tourism launch in September of
the first all-civilian crew sent to Earth orbit without professional
astronauts.
The space station, spanning the size of an American football
field end to end, has been continuously occupied since November 2000, operated
by an international partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries.
An international crew of at least seven people typically
lives and works aboard the platform while traveling 5 miles (8 km) per second,
orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes. © Reuters
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