A four-astronaut team arrived at the International Space Station
on Saturday aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour, NASA said, after
becoming the first crew ever to be propelled into orbit by a rocket booster
recycled from a previous spaceflight.
اضافة اعلان
The Endeavour capsule, also making its second flight, was launched
into space on Friday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from
NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX is Elon Musk's commercial rocket company.
The Endeavour docked to the space station complex at 5:08am
EDT (0908 GMT) while the spacecraft were flying 425km above the Indian Ocean,
NASA said in an
update on the mission.
On board were two NASA astronauts - mission commander Shane
Kimbrough, 53, and pilot Megan McArthur, 49 - along with Japanese astronaut
Akihiko Hoshide, 52, and fellow mission specialist Thomas Pesquet, 43, a French
engineer from the European Space Agency.
The mission marks the second "operational" space
station team launched by NASA aboard a Crew Dragon capsule since human
spaceflights resumed from American soil last year, following a nine-year hiatus
at the end of the US space shuttle program in 2011.
It is also the third crewed flight launched into orbit in 11
months under NASA's fledgling public-private partnership with SpaceX, the
rocket company founded in 2002 by Musk, who is also CEO of electric car maker
Tesla Inc.
The mission's Falcon 9 rocket blasted off with the same
first-stage booster that lofted a crew into orbit five months ago, marking the
first time a previously flown booster has ever been re-used in a crewed launch.
Reusable booster vehicles, designed to fly themselves back
to Earth and land safely rather than fall into the sea after launch, are at the
heart of a re-usable rocket strategy that SpaceX helped pioneer to make
spaceflight more economical.
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