The team will replace four astronauts leaving in early May, with Italian Samantha Cristoforetti becoming the first European woman to take command of the space station.
Four astronauts, three from NASA and one from the European Space Agency, arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday and hooked up their SpaceX capsule, two days after the last crew to leave orbit returned to Earth.
The Crew Dragon capsule meeting with the station less than 16 hours after the launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, marked one of Elon Musk’s fastest SpaceX flights to the ISS from takeoff to landing, NASA commentators said in Internet.
The fully automated dock took place around 7:37 p.m. Florida time (11:37 p.m. GMT), while the Crew Dragon capsule, called Freedom, and the space station flew about 420 kilometers (260 miles) over the central Pacific, according to NASA.
Freedom’s crew consists of three NASA astronauts from the United States – Flight Commander Kel Lindgren, 49; mission pilot Bob Hines, 47; and mission specialist Jessica Watkins, 33, and Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, 45, of the European Space Agency (ESA).
The newcomers will join the seven existing ISS occupants, the four-member team they will replace – three Americans and a German teammate from ESA’s crew, due to complete its mission in early May – and three Russian astronauts.
The Freedom crew is the fourth full-fledged ISS crew to be launched by NASA aboard the SpaceX vehicle since the California-based rocket company began flying astronauts on the US space agency in 2020.
European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy will take command of the six-month ISS mission, becoming the first European woman to do so. [Joe Skipper/Reuters]
Team leader Lindgren, an emergency physician and one-time flight surgeon, is making his second trip to the ISS, where he entered orbit for 141 days and made two spacewalks in 2015.
Christophoretti, an ESA astronaut and pilot of the Italian Air Force jet, is on her second voyage to the space station and will take command of ISS operations during the team’s six-month stay, becoming Europe’s first woman to do so.
Watkins, a doctoral geologist studying major landslides on Mars and Earth, is on his first space mission and will be the first African-American to join a long-term ISS mission.
Hines, also on his first space trip, is a pilot of a U.S. Air Force fighter jet that has accumulated more than 3,500 hours of flight time in 50 aircraft types and completed 76 combat missions.
The ISS is the largest man-made space object and has been continuously occupied since November 2000 thanks to an international consortium of five space agencies from 15 countries, led by the United States and Russia.
An international crew of at least seven usually lives and works aboard the platform while traveling at 8 km (5 miles) per second, orbiting the Earth once every 90 minutes.
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