Four new crew members for the International Space Station docked Thursday at the orbiting laboratory where they will stay for approximately six months.<\/p>\n
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew-13 mission team lifted off at 11:10 am local time (1510 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.<\/p>\n
Seven hours and 55 minutes later, the SpaceX Dragon “Grace” capsule docked at an ISS port, setting a record for the fastest trip by a US spacecraft to the outpost, NASA officials said.<\/p>\n
In a live broadcast on NASA TV, the capsule appeared to glide gently toward a stationary ISS as both hurtled through space at some 17,500 miles (28,163 km) per hour.<\/p>\n
“Dragon SpaceX on the big loop. Hard capture is complete,” a ground control official announced, signalling completion of docking.<\/p>\n
Up next: the opening of hatches enabling the new arrivals — Americans Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Joshua Kutryk, and Russian Sergey Teteryatnikov — to float into the space station through a pressurized vestibule.<\/p>\n
The duration of the journey depends greatly on the distance between the ISS and the spacecraft at the time of launch.<\/p>\n
It took more than 30 hours for the last crew that launched from American soil to reach the station.<\/p>\n
The new ISS crew was initially meant to arrive in mid-September, but its launch was postponed due to a leak aboard the Dragon.<\/p>\n
Crew-13 is taking over from Americans Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Frenchwoman Sophie Adenot and Russian Andrey Fedyaev.<\/p>\n
Crew-12 is set to return to Earth as early as Monday, though the schedule depends on weather conditions.<\/p>\n
Canadian Kutryk will have an extra reason to look forward to his return in six months’ time — his wife is due to give birth during his stay in space.<\/p>\n
Continuously inhabited for the last quarter-century, the aging ISS is scheduled to be pushed out of orbit before crashing into one of Earth’s oceans sometime around 2030.<\/p>\n
Despite many international cooperation agreements falling apart after Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022, the United States and other ISS partners have continued working with Russia on the space station.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
-BSS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Four new crew members for the International Space Station docked Thursday at…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[415,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science-technology","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3419,"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions\/3419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dhakastatement.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}