SpaceX ‘crew Dragon’ capsule docks with International Space Station for first time
- Unmanned craft test flight seen as successful, as space travel start-up enters new era of collaboration with Nasa
SpaceX’s new crew capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, acing its second milestone in just over a day.
No one was aboard the Dragon capsule launched Saturday on its first test flight, only an instrumented dummy. But the three station astronauts had front-row seats as the sleek, white vessel neatly docked and became the first American-made, designed-for-crew spacecraft to pull up in eight years.
Television cameras on Dragon as well as the space station provided stunning views of one another throughout the rendezvous.
If the six-day demo goes well, SpaceX could launch two astronauts this summer under Nasa’s commercial crew programme. Both astronauts – Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken – were at SpaceX Mission Control in Southern California, watching the action. They rushed there from Florida after seeing the Dragon rocket into orbit early on Saturday from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre.
“Just super excited to see it,” Behnken said minutes after the link-up. “Just one more milestone that gets us ready for our flight coming up here.”
While SpaceX has sent plenty of cargo Dragons to the space station, the crew Dragon is a different beast. It docked autonomously under the station astronauts’ watchful eyes, instead of relying on the station’s robot arm for berthing. Behnken said that is the way it should work when he and Hurley are on board; they may push a button or two and will have the ability to intervene, if necessary.
As part of Sunday’s shakedown, the station astronauts sent commands for the Dragon to retreat and then move forward again, before the capsule closed in for good.