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The SpaceX Dragon, with four astronauts on board, has arrived at the International Space Station ISS. The docking took place around 5 am Italian time. For the company SpaceX, the visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk, and NASA it is the beginning of a new stage of missions in space; for the US, a very important chapter in returning to the race into space and breaking the Russian monopoly.
The spacecraft, which is called “Resilience”, docked at the space station about 260 miles (400 kilometers) above the state of Ohio in the midwestern United States. The crew is made up of three Americans – Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker – and the Japanese Soichi Noguchi; and he joined the two Russians and the American who were already on board the station: he will remain there for six months. Along the way, there was a problem with the cabin temperature control system that was quickly resolved.
SpaceX broadcast live images from inside the capsule showing the astronauts in place, which neither the Russians nor the Americans have done until now.
Elon Musk’s company is building its fortune on the reusable rocket business, which dramatically reduces business costs. The Falcon 9 rocket, which launched the Dragon spacecraft, is in fact reusable and landed shortly after liftoff from Cape Canaveral on a platform in the Atlantic. Now it will reuse that part of the rocket for the next mission, always obviously in collaboration with NASA to the ISS, which is scheduled for March next year: the current one is in fact the first of at least six missions that SpaceX will carry out to the ISS with a $ 2.6 billion Contract signed with NASA in 2014.
Dragon is the first privately owned and operated spacecraft certified by NASA for manned spaceflight. The “operational” flight follows the successful demonstration mission in May, Demo-2, in which two American astronauts were flown to the ISS and then safely returned to Earth by SpaceX.
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