Astronauts on historic flight arrives at ISS
SpaceX delivered two astronauts to the International Space Station for Nasa, following up a historic liftoff with an equally smooth docking in yet another first for Elon Musk’s company.
With test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken poised to take over manual control if necessary, the SpaceX Dragon capsule pulled up to the station and docked automatically yesterday, no assistance needed.
It was the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft carried astronauts to the orbiting lab in its nearly 20 years.
Nasa considers this the opening volley in a business revolution encircling Earth and eventually stretching to the moon and Mars.
The docking occurred just 19 hours after a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket aboard blasted off flawlessly on Saturday in a cloud of bright orange flames and smoke from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
Thousands jammed surrounding beaches, bridges and towns to watch as SpaceX became the world’s first private company to send astronauts into orbit, and ended a nineyear launch drought for Nasa.
A few hours before docking, the Dragon riders reported that the capsule was performing beautifully.
Just in case, they slipped back into their pressurized launch suits and helmets for the rendezvous.
The three space station residents – US astronaut Chris Cassidy as well as Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner – kept cameras trained on the incoming capsule for the benefit of flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Gleaming white in the sunlight, the Dragon was easily visible from a few miles out, its nose cone open and exposing its docking hook as well as a blinking light.
Hurley and Behnken took over the controls and did a little piloting less than a couple hundred meters out as part of the test flight, before putting it back into automatic for the final approach.
Hurley said the capsule handled “really well, very crisp.”
SpaceX and Nasa officials had held off on any celebrations until after yesterday morning’s docking – and possibly not until the two astronauts are back on Earth sometime this summer.
Nasa has yet to decide how long Hurley and Behnken will spend at the space station, somewhere between one and four months.
While they’re there, the Dragon test pilots will join the space station residents in performing experiments and possibly spacewalks to install fresh station batteries.
In a show-and-tell earlier yesterday, the astronauts gave a quick tour of the Dragon’s sparkling clean insides, quite spacious for a capsule. They said the liftoff was pretty bumpy and dynamic, nothing the simulators could have mimicked.
The blue sequinned dinosaur accompanying them – their young sons’ toy, named Tremor – was also in good shape, Behnken assured viewers.
Tremor was going to join Earthy, a plush globe delivered to the space station on last year’s test flight of a crew-less crew Dragon. Behnken said both toys would return to Earth with them at mission’s end.
An old-style capsule splashdown is planned.
After liftoff, Musk told reporters that the capsule’s return will be more dangerous in some ways than its launch.
“This is hopefully the first step on a journey toward a civilisation on Mars,” he said on Saturday.