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Four astronauts aboard a newly developed spacecraft from Elon Musk’s SpaceX space company greeted their new crewmates aboard the International Space Station on Tuesday after successfully docking at a milestone for private space travel.
In NASA’s first full-fledged mission carrying a crew to orbit in a privately owned spacecraft, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Resilience opened the hatch shortly after 1:00 am EST (0600 GMT), two hours after the docked and 27 hours later a Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“SpaceX, that’s resilience. Great job. Right in the middle,” Dragon crew commander Mike Hopkins said from the spacecraft after docking. “SpaceX and NASA, congratulations, this is a new era of operational flights to the International Space Station from the coast of Florida.”
A few minutes later, the crew of three Americans and a Japanese astronaut emerged from the capsule and boarded the station, greeting the existing crew of a US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts with hugs and high five.
The space station, an orbital laboratory about 400 km above Earth, will be their home for the next six months. Later, another set of astronauts on a Crew Dragon capsule will replace them. That rotation will continue until Boeing joins the program with its own spacecraft at the end of next year.
NASA has relied on the Russian space program since 2011, when the US shuttle program ended.
Hopkins arrived with two fellow NASA astronauts, pilot Victor Glover and physicist Shannon Walker, as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, making his third space voyage after previously flying the US shuttle in 2005 and Soyuz in 2009.
“The last 27 hours have been really good,” Hopkins said after boarding the space station. “We look forward to the next six months and we can’t wait to get started.”
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