Two NASA astronauts just arrived at the International Space Station in a SpaceX capsule.
The spacecraft handled just like it did in the simulators back on Earth. The astronauts carefully toggled the controls and signaled the thrusters to gently nudge the capsule around. Outside, fuel escaped in plumes, glittering brightly against the matte black of space before vanishing.
But minutes before the astronauts approached the International Space Station, the commander let go.
The SpaceX capsule they flew in is designed to dock itself autonomously to the space station. Doug Hurley, the spacecraft commander, knew that, when the time came, he would relinquish control to the flight computers. But he’s not quite used to it. He’s a Marine pilot, and the last time he flew to space, he carefully maneuvered the space shuttle toward the ISS on his own, with a steady hand.
“I can promise you that the hardest thing they’ll do tomorrow is, when they’re done flying [manually], is to hand it back over to the computers and not dock it themselves,” Pat Forrester, the chief of NASA’s astronaut office and a former astronaut himself, told me yesterday. “Because they are test pilots… that is exactly what they would enjoy doing.”
But the space shuttles aren’t flying anymore. SpaceX is.
Hurley and his fellow astronaut Bob Behnken reached the ISS this morning, a day after launching from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Their capsule made contact with the space station as both flew over the border of China and Mongolia, about 250 miles above Earth. Capsule and station are now flying as one, cruising at more than 17,000 miles an hour.
Their arrival is part of a historic mission designed not by NASA, but by a private American contractor. Elon Musk’s space company, founded in 2002, is behind the mission from start to finish. Hurley and Behnken, both NASA astronauts, launched in SpaceX suits, atop a SpaceX rocket. When they went to sleep last night, curled into sleeping bags in their seats, the voice they heard from Mission Control didn’t come from Houston, but from Hawthorne, the city in California where SpaceX is headquartered.
NASA hired SpaceX for this job because the agency can no longer launch astronauts on its own.
