CNN :
A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft – carrying four astronauts from three countries – docked with the International Space Station early Saturday morning ET, beginning the crew’s six-month stay in space.
This mission, dubbed Crew-2, marks the third-ever crewed flight for Elon Musk’s company and the first to make use of a previously flown, privately-owned rocket booster and spacecraft.
The astronauts took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida Friday morning and spent nearly 24 hours soaring through orbit at more than 17,000 miles per hour, as their Crew Dragon spacecraft maneuvered toward the ISS, which orbits about 250 miles above Earth.
On Saturday morning, the capsule slowly aligned itself and moved in to dock directly with one of the space station’s ports.
The crew consists of NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide with Japan’s JAXA space agency.
A prime focus of the astronauts’ mission will be research with “tissue chips,” or “small models of human organs containing multiple cell types that behave much the same as they do in the body” and that NASA hopes will advance the development of drugs and vaccines, according to the space agency. That work will build on years of studying biological and other scientific phenomena aboard the ISS, where the microgravity environment can give scientists a better fundamental understanding of how something works.
