The demonstration mission of SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule successfully docked Sunday on the International Space Station, passing a key test before it can begin taking US astronauts into space.
The docking of the capsule, which has only a dummy on board, was concluded at 1051 GMT, nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) over the surface of the Earth, NASA and SpaceX confirmed during a live broadcast of the mission.
A little over two hours later, the space station’s three crew members — American Anne McClain, Canadian David Saint-Jacques and Russian Oleg Kononenko — opened the hatch of the space capsule and, for the first time, penetrated its interior in space.
There they found the dummy, Ripley, strapped to a seat, and an untethered plush toy in the form of the blue planet, which SpaceX had jokingly placed there as a “super high-tech zero-g indicator.”
“Welcome to the new era in spaceflight,” McClain said from inside Dragon.
Saint-Jacques tweeted about the experience monitoring Crew Dragon’s “first-ever approach and docking” to the space station, hailing it as “the dawn of a new era in human spaceflight!”
NASA chief Jim Bridenstine tweeted his congratulations on “this historic achievement,” which brings the United States a big step closer to its goal of again flying astronauts into space on American rockets.
NASA has relied on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the space station since the end of the US space shuttle program in 2011 after a 30-year run.
The capsule, also called Dragon or Dragon 2, approached the space station very gradually, carefully synchronizing its speed and trajectory.
Contact appeared to be made very slowly, but in actuality both spacecraft were orbiting the Earth at more than 27,000 kilometers per hour.
From blast-off at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday to contact Sunday, the flight took 27 hours. Dragon will detach itself from the space station next Friday and splash down in the Atlantic Ocean, its descent slowed by four parachutes.
The mission is a dress rehearsal, without anyone on board, for Dragon’s first manned mission, which should take place this year. The test run sought to demonstrate that the vehicle is reliable and safe, so that NASA can resume manned flights from US soil this year.
