The SpaceX space capsule has successfully joined the ISS

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon space capsule of four astronauts, launched Sunday by the United States, successfully joined the International Space Station (ISS) on Tuesday morning.

The DPA news agency informed them.

“The hatch on the bridge between the Crew Dragon capsule and the space station will open after the pressure in both systems has stabilized,” NASA said in a statement. The spacecraft joined the ISS at 5:00 CET, approximately 27 hours after launch from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.

NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, as well as Soichi Noguchi of the Japanese space agency JAXA, are aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. Their mission called Crew-1 will last six months.

NASA hopes this successful launch will be the beginning of a long series of scheduled manned flights to the ISS from the United States. The collaboration with SpaceX ended American astronauts’ nine-year dependence on Russian rockets, which carried them into space after the end of the space shuttle program.

In May, the historic launch of American astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board the ISS Crew Dragon took place. Their mission was the first manned flight to space from the United States in nearly a decade. At the same time, it was the first time that people had been brought into Earth’s orbit by a private company.

For SpaceX, this was the last major demonstration of the capabilities needed by NASA to confirm that it would use the SpaceX spacecraft for scheduled flights. This paved the way for possible flights of tourists into space.

The Crew Dragon Capsules are launched into space by the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, also from the SpaceX workshop.