The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying four astronauts will arrive at the International Space Station early Sunday (August 27) and you can watch it all live online in a free live stream.
The Crew Dragon Endurance capsule is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) at 8:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT), It will dock with the space-facing port on the U.S.-built Harmony module at the outpost.
The docking will mark the end of a nearly 30-hour journey for the four-person capsule crew, which lifted off in the early hours of Saturday from NASA’s Platform 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. You can watch the docking process live online, provided by NASA TV and SpaceX, starting at 10:00 p.m. 6:45 a.m. EST (1045 GMT). It will appear at the start time in the window above, or you can watch directly from NASA TV.
“SpaceX, thanks for the ride, it was great,” NASA’s SpaceX 7 crew commander Jasmine Moqbley said after the crew reached orbit. “Go Crew-7, great trip.”
NASA’s Crew-7 mission transports two passengers to the International Space Station with a truly international crew: pilot Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency; and mission specialists Konstantin Borisov of Russia’s Roscosmos agency and Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The Quartet is the first fully international crew, comprising members from four different agencies and countries, to fly on the same Dragon capsule.
This mission is the seventh operational commercial crewed flight for NASA by SpaceX, and the company’s eighth for the US space agency overall (including a crewed test flight). It is SpaceX’s 11th manned mission when it has included three private astronaut flights in recent years.
The Crew-7 astronauts begin a six-month expedition to the space station and will replace the four astronauts on NASA’s Crew-6 mission, who are scheduled to return shortly after the arrival of Meqble and her crew.
Crew-7 is the first space flight for Moqbali, a lieutenant colonel in the US Marine Corps who became the second Iranian-American to fly into space on the flight. It is also Borisov’s first flight.
Related: Meet the Crew-7 astronauts who fly with SpaceX
While Morgensen and Furukawa have flown to the International Space Station before, Morgensen is the first European ever to pilot a SpaceX Dragon capsule. SpaceX’s Endurance capsule is also an astronaut, having flown Crew-3 and Crew-5 astronaut missions to the station for NASA.
NASA and SpaceX have a special deal planned for Crew-7’s arrival at the International Space Station on Sunday.
“We’re going to do a flyby around the International Space Station and get some great pictures and give them out to everyone to show just how great a site we have,” Joel Montalbano, NASA’s space station program manager, told reporters afterward. release.
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