Crew Dragon Docks With Space Station
HOUSTON (NASA PR) — NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour have arrived at the International Space Station.
The Crew Dragon arrived at the station’s Harmony port, docking at 10:16 a.m. EDT while the spacecraft were flying about 262 miles above the northern border of China and Mongolia. Following soft capture, 12 hooks were closed to complete a hard capture at 10:27 a.m. Teams now will begin conducting standard leak checks and pressurization between the spacecraft in preparation for hatch opening scheduled for approximately 12:45 p.m.
NASA Television and the agency’s website are continuing to provide live continuous coverage of the agency’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission.
Behnken and Hurley made history Saturday as they became the first Americans to launch on an American rocket from American soil to the space station in nearly a decade. Their successful docking completed many of the test objectives of the SpaceX Demo-2 mission, and the rest will be completed as the spacecraft operates as part of the space station, then at the conclusion of its mission undocks and descends for a parachute landing in the Atlantic Ocean.
Aboard the space station, Expedition 63 Commander and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner are preparing to welcome Behnken and Hurley aboard the station.
Follow along with mission activities and get more information at: https://blogs.nasa.gov/station. Learn more about commercial crew and space station activities by following @Commercial_Crew, @space_station, and @ISS_Research on Twitter as well as the Commercial Crew Facebook, ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.
14 responses to “Crew Dragon Docks With Space Station”
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Congratulations on another milestone. Colonel Hurley was on the last Shuttle mission so he should know where the flag is to bring home.?
it was right behind him, where he was wiping the blood off.
It’s sad to choose to hijack this thread by branding NASA astronauts as racist.
???
WTF are you talking about or what are you on?
The crew was at the opening where the small flag is at, that endeavor is going to bring back.
In addition, Colonel Hurley hit his forehead on something and was wiping the blood off his forehead continually. he is obviously on blood thinners.
OK, I didn’t see he hit his head. I thought your comment was about blood on the flag because of the protests going on in the USA. Sorry.
I imagine all astronauts take them before and during a flight as the risk of blood clogs increases greatly in Zero-G.
Ok, it makes sense why you would not understand why I meant.
But, how did you jump to claiming that I “branding NASA astronauts as racist.”?
That is an AMAZING leap of logic.
Because some in the media claimed that NASA was racist by pulling astronaut Epps from an ISS mission last year. I expect that in this charged atmosphere it is only a matter of before similar charges will be made about the astronauts on the Dragon2, especially as President Trump praises them.
Yeah, but I doubt that you will find few here that are racists or foolish like that. Yes, we have our political POV, but that has nothing to do with NASA/space.
Personally, I would guess that most all, if not all, of us, would LOVE to see CONgress/WH only be able to allocate the $ for Space and then let an independent board make the choices, so as to remove the politics from this.
I agree.
I hope Jeanette J. Epps (PH.D.) will eventually get to fly. I never read anything official out of NASA that said exactly why she was bumped. And, of course, nothing in her official NASA bio even mentions the Soyuz/ISS flight she was originally scheduled to be on. But it’s obvious because her bio picture is of her in a Soyuz spacesuit.
https://chicagocrusader.com…
I am not certain what will happen with her.
Sadly, when you run around and knock the very institution that wants to employ you,
they tend to not put you in public eye.
This is true. If she ran afoul of internal NASA management, she’s quite unlikely to to get a future flight assignment. From what I’ve heard, to avoid bad PR, NASA will just never assign someone who’s “problematic” to an actual flight. They’ll still be an “active astronaut” and continue to train, but they won’t get any other meaningful assignments either. Sometimes astronauts are assigned to help with design reviews for upcoming hardware like new EVA suits, Dragon 2, Starliner, Gateway, crewed lunar landers, and etc.
In other words, they make it so the astronaut realizes that they’re never going to do anything meaningful as an “active astronaut”, so they resign for “personal reasons”. This keeps NASA looking all rosy. And, to the public, it makes it look like all their astronaut picks are “perfect”.
Epps didn’t knock NASA. The racism charge was made by her brother.
Epps’s background was as an aerospace engineer. She was replaced on what was to have been her ISS mission by an astronaut-physician. In the wake of the Kelly brothers’ Twin Study and reports of long-term physiological changes due to extended time in zero-G, perhaps NASA just felt they needed medical expertise on that mission more than engineering expertise.
It would have been nice if NASA had provided some sort of explanation for the change-out, though. Although if the reason was the Russians being racists, I can see why NASA might have elected to say nothing. Now that we aren’t dependent on the Russians for ISS transport anymore, perhaps the truth will come out if that was, indeed, the truth.
I heard stories Russia was unhappy because of her previous work for the CIA, but that shouldn’t have been an issue. I suspect it was mostly a case of the Russians reminding us how dependent we were on them for ISS access. Yes, thank goodness for Dragon2. Now if Boeing will just get the Starliner flying…