Four astronauts, three from NASA and one from the European Space Agency, arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday and tied up their SpaceX capsule, two days after the last crew left the orbiter returned to Earth. The Crew Dragon capsule meeting with the station less than 16 hours after launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, marked one of Elon Musk SpaceX’s fastest flights to ISS, from landing to landing. said NASA broadcast commentators. The fully automated dock took place at approximately 7:37 p.m. Florida time (23:37 GMT) while the Crew Dragon capsule, called Freedom, and the space station flew about 420 kilometers (260 miles) over the central Pacific Ocean, according to NASA. . The Freedom crew consists of three NASA astronauts from the United States – Flight Commander Kjell Lindgren, 49. the pilot of the mission Bob Hines, 47; and mission expert Jessica Watkins, 33 – as well as 45-year-old Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency (ESA). The new arrivals will include the seven existing ISS crew members in the four-member team that will replace – three Americans and a German ESA crew member who will complete their mission in early May – three Russian cosmonauts. The Freedom crew is the fourth ISS full crew to be launched by NASA on a SpaceX vehicle since the California-based rocket company began flying US astronauts in 2020. European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti from Italy to command the six-month ISS mission, becoming the first European woman to do so [Joe Skipper/Reuters] The team leader Lindgren, an emergency physician and flight surgeon, is making his second trip to the ISS, where he spent 141 days in orbit and took two spacewalks in 2015. Cristoforetti, ESA astronaut and jet pilot of the Italian Air Force, is on her second trip to the space station and will take over the management of the ISS operations during the group’s six-year term, becoming the first woman in Europe to do so. the role. Watkins, a geologist who earned her doctorate studying large landslides on Mars and Earth, is on her first space mission and will become the first African-American to take part in a long-term mission to the ISS. Hines, also on his first spaceflight, is a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot who has flown more than 3,500 flight hours on 50 aircraft and completed 76 combat missions. The ISS is the largest man-made spacecraft and has been operating continuously since November 2000, thanks to an international US-led consortium of five space agencies from 15 countries. An international crew of at least seven usually lives and works on the platform while traveling at 8 kilometers (5 miles) per second, circling the Earth about once every 90 minutes.
