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MOSCOW, May 31. / TAX /. The head of the Russian state space company Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin congratulated NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine and SpaceX founder Elon Musk on the successful docking of the Crew Dragon manned spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) and said that he liked Musk’s “ trampoline ” joke.
“Dear Jim Bridenstine, At this point I can congratulate you on a successful launch [of Crew Dragon] and the docking [to ISS]. Good boy! I know how eager you were for this great event to become a success. I wish the NASA team would successfully finish the rebuilding of its national space transportation system, ”he wrote on his Twitter account.
He also asked the NASA chief to express congratulations to Elon Musk and the SpaceX team and expressed hope for further cooperation. He also noticed that he liked Musk’s joke on a trampoline.
“The trampoline works,” Musk said at a press conference after Crew Dragon’s launch, obviously referring to Rogozin’s tweet about a trampoline. The Roscosmos boss wrote on his Twitter account that he saved the Russian space sector from US sanctions in 2014, when he offered the US to take astronauts to the ISS by means of a diving board.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft with Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken aboard successfully docked at the International Space Station (ISS Sunday. Crew Dragon was launched using the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on May 30 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Crew Dragon is a configuration of the Dragon spacecraft, which had already delivered cargo to the ISS. A Falcon-9 rocket put the cargo vehicle into space on March 2. Her docking with the ISS was done automatically the next day.
NASA halted manned flights in 2011 after the end of the Space Shuttle program. From then on, all astronauts were delivered to the ISS and back from the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The United States was originally supposed to start using commercial spacecraft for manned missions in 2017.
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