Crew Dragon after docking with the International Space Station, March 3, 2023.
Cape Canaveral (USA) – Docked safely at the International Space Station (ISS) Crew Dragon, which launched from the US spaceport on Thursday. It carried a four-man crew consisting of two Americans, a Russian and a citizen of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) into orbit. This was reported by the Reuters agency.
Advertisement'; }
The SpaceX spacecraft docked with the space station shortly after 7:40 a.m. CET, nearly 25 hours after liftoff from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The connection took place when the ISS and the ship flew side by side at a speed of 28,164 kilometers per hour and about 240 kilometers over the East African region, NASA said in a live broadcast on its website.
Two Americans Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, representative of the Russian Roscosmos agency Andrey Fedayev and UAE astronaut Sultan Nijadi, who is only the second UAE citizen to fly on the ISS, flew to the ISS. They should spend six months at the station. Crew Commander Bowen said before the flight that they make a great team together, despite the animosity between their countries at the moment due to the war in Ukraine.
The four-member team is expected to conduct more than 200 experiments and technology trials aboard the space station, from research on human cell growth in space to controlling flammable substances in weightlessness. Some of the research is intended to help pave the way for future long-duration human missions to the moon as part of NASA's Artemis program, the US space agency said. The ISS crew will also be in charge of maintenance and repairs aboard the station, as well as preparing for the arrival and departure of additional astronauts and cargo ships. 2020 was made by billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX company.
The crew of the Crew Dragon ship is to replace NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Russia's Anna Kikin and Japan's Koichi Wakata on the ISS. They have been on the ISS since last October. Along with them, there are three other astronauts, whose return to Earth was complicated by damage to the Soyuz MS-22 ship, which was hit by a micrometeorite. On Sunday, the Soyuz MS-23 ship arrived for them at the ISS, which is to return to earth with them in September. The mission of cosmonauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin and astronaut Frank Rubio will thus be extended from six months to a year.
