Elon Musk’s company sends a dummy and a plush doll to the International Space Station aboard its spacecraft designed to eventually carry astronauts. In the process, it literally opened a door that has been shut for years.
At 5:07 a.m. PT Sunday, a hatch was opened that had been shut and locked since 2011. Moments later, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko passed through the open pressurized mating adapter on the forward end of the International Space Station and into a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
It was the first time humans have entered a Crew Dragon while in space and the first time anything has passed through that hatch since the Space Shuttle Atlantis docked to the ISS’ forward end in 2011.
