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Four astronauts who left Sunday aboard a spacecraft designed by the SpaceX company arrived on Monday at the International Space Station, where they will spend six months.
The capsule successfully docked at the station after a 27-hour flight from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The space station is an orbital laboratory about 400 kilometers above the Earth.
Americans Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Japanese Soichi Noguchi completed NASA’s first mission on a private Crew Dragon spacecraft to bring a crew to the orbital station.
During a mid-year test flight, two pilots went to the station in a Crew Dragon capsule, but only stayed two months.
The new astronauts were joined on Monday by the two Russian cosmonauts and the American astronaut who arrived last month on a Russian spacecraft from Kazakhstan.
Victor Glover is the first African American to spend a lot of time in space.
NASA and SpaceX send four astronauts to the International Space Station
SpaceX sent four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday, the first transport flight for NASA by a private company.
From the beginning of the American astronauts’ space travel in 1961, NASA was responsible for all the technical details of the ships, although their construction was contracted out to private firms.
However, after the suspension of the shuttle program in 2011, American astronauts had to rely on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
With the success of SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, the United States will now bring its astronauts in capsules and rockets from private firms. Boeing is expected to join these flights soon with its Starliner capsule.
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