According to NASA, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and its four Crew-2 astronauts successfully docked with the International Space Station nearly 24 hours after taking off to start its six-month mission. Crew-2 is SpaceX’s third astronaut mission under the NASA Commercial Crew Program.
Aboard the flight to the ISS were NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Akihiko Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and French aerospace engineer from the European Space Agency (ESA), Thomas Pesquet. All four docked successfully on the ISS which travels at more than 17,000 miles per hour in orbit roughly 250 miles above Earth.
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The flight reused a Falcon 9 rocket which was used for SpaceX’s Crew-1 mission in 2020. The Falcon 9 also carried Endeavour, the same Crew Dragon capsule that launched SpaceX’s debut astronaut mission in 2020.
The four astronauts joined the Expedition 65 crew already aboard the ISS. Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Mark Vande Hei of NASA, Soichi Noguchi of JAXA, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov, were on hand to receive them.
“Endeavour arriving!” Welcome to the @Space_Station, Crew-2!
Their arrival means there are now 11 humans aboard our orbiting laboratory, a number not seen since the space shuttle era. Hugs abound. pic.twitter.com/uSwW3JFl6K
— NASA (@NASA) April 24, 2021
The four aboard the SpaceX Crew-2 mission will now spend six months in space conducting science experiments. These include a focus on “tissue chips,” which NASA describes as “small models of human organs containing multiple cell types that behave much the same as they do in the body”. These tissue chips may help achieve a breakthrough in identifying drugs or vaccines more quickly than the current processes.
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