SpaceX’s four-member Crew Dragon team reached the International Space Station on Thursday, ahead of a five-month science mission. The team includes a Russian cosmonaut and the first Native American woman sent to orbit. The inclusion of Anna Kikina, the lone female cosmonaut in active service with Russian space agency Roscosmos, was a sign of continued US-Russian cooperation in space, despite the ongoing Ukraine war.
A four-member SpaceX Crew Dragon team, including a Russian cosmonaut and the first Native American woman sent to orbit, safely docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday and moved aboard to begin a five-month science mission.
Rendezvous of the latest NASA expedition to the orbiting laboratory came just after 5 EDT (2:30am IST) following a 29-hour flight to the ISS as the two vehicles circled the globe some 420 km above Earth off the west coast of Africa, according to a NASA webcast of the docking.
The autonomously flying Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Endurance, was lofted into orbit on Wednesday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The crew consists of two American NASA astronauts – flight commander Nicole Aunapu Mann, 45, and pilot Josh Cassada, 49 – as well as Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, 59, a veteran of four previous spaceflights, and cosmonaut Anna Kikina, 38, the first Russian aboard an American spacecraft in 20 years.
