Crew-7 astronauts arrived aboard the Dragon Endurance spacecraft Sunday to begin six months of work in the orbiting laboratory.
Relief team arrives at the International Space Station. The Crew-7 astronauts, an international crew representing four nations, arrived Sunday aboard the Dragon Endurance spacecraft, after 30 hours of travel and a slow docking maneuver, beginning six months of work in the orbiting laboratory.
AdvertisingThe launch, which NASA described as “successful,” took place early Saturday from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The spacecraft docked autonomously in the International Space Station’s Harmony space module port at 9:16 a.m. EDT (1:16 p.m. GMT).
The Dragon spacecraft hatch opened at 10:58 AM ET (1458 GMT), shortly after the station crew opened another hatch located “between the space station and the pressurized docking transducer.”
Astronauts Yasmine Mokbeli of NASA, Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency, Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Konstantin Borisov of Roscosmos join Expedition 69.
Until the previous team, Crew-6, returns to Earth in a few days, 11 crew members will be sharing space aboard the station. And in the live images, the hosts of the International Space Station can be seen welcoming the new astronauts with hugs.
In doing so, Crew-7 joins NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen, Woody Hoburgh, and Frank Rubio, as well as Emirati astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi, and Roscosmos astronauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petlin, and Andrey Vedyev.
During their stay, the NASA and SpaceX team will conduct “science and technology demonstrations to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit.”
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