The historic test mission successfully docks with the ISS, ticking off another important milestone as it prepares to carry humans to space.
SpaceX has taken another small step toward sending astronauts into space after launching the Crew Dragon capsule early Saturday morning and successfully docking with International Space Station.
Affixed to the top of a Falcon 9 booster, the rounded cone capsule of the Crew Dragon blasted off in a blaze of fire and smoke from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 2:49 a.m. ET Saturday. The launch was the first step in the Demo-1 mission, designed to test the capabilities of the capsule over the next week, but it was only the beginning.
After launch the capsule coasted to the International Space Station (ISS) making a number of maneuvers to line up with a specialized docking adapter aboard the station. Though live footage of the event seemed rather benign, both the Crew Dragon and the ISS were travelling at over 17,500 miles per hour during the monumental docking attempt.
Crew Dragon achieved soft capture with the ISS at 5:51 a.m. ET but the high-speed space grab was not over. Shortly after, 12 hooks reached out from Crew Dragon to firmly attach it to the ISS, enabling a « hard capture » of the capsule at 6:00 a.m. ET and marking the first successful docking of a Commercial Crew capsule at the ISS.
No human crew are on board, but the capsule isn’t empty. Locked within Crew Dragon is a flight dummy nicknamed Ripley and an anthropomorphic plushie of planet Earth designed to indicate when the capsule had reached zero gravity.
