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Gentle Catch, the first part of the fusion procedure, took place at 4 pm 1 minute. At Greenwich Mean Time (6 pm 1 pm Lithuania), and the second phase of this procedure, the “hard merger” occurred a few minutes later.
The spacecraft, called Resilience, automatically connected to the TKS Harmony module approximately 27 hours after launch as the station flew at an altitude of about 400 km over the state of Ohio, in the midwestern United States.
Finally, the hatches of the spacecraft and orbital station were opened.
The Resilience team consists of three Americans: Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, as well as the Japanese Soichi Noguchi.
Earlier, the mission commander, M. Hopkins, in keeping with NASA tradition, presented pilot V.Glover with a “gold badge”, showing that the astronaut crossed the 100 km high Karman line, the limit officially recognized space.
Glover is the first black astronaut to work at TKS for a long time, and Noguchi became the first non-American spacecraft created by a private company.
“The Resilience crew contributed to the TKS crew members: Russian astronauts Sergei Ryzhikov and Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and American astronaut Kathleen Rubin. They will work at the station for six months.
Crew Dragon 1’s first regular flight began Sunday with the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7 pm 27 min. local (Monday 2:27 am Lithuania) on time from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The SpaceX spacecraft lifted nearly a decade of American dependence on Russian Soyuz missiles to bring American astronauts to TKS in 2011 following the end of the reusable space shuttle program.
SpaceX is scheduled to host two more NASA-commissioned flights next year, the first of which will take place in the spring. Furthermore, four cargo capsule flights are expected to take place over the next 15 months, during which supplies will be transported to TKS.
NASA reached out to SpaceX and Boeing when it closed its Space Shuttle program, which failed to meet two key goals: making space flight cheaper and safer.
The agency will allocate more than $ 8 billion by 2024. $ 6.8 billion for a commercial manned flight program, in the hope that the private sector will address NASA’s “low-Earth orbit” needs, and You can focus on getting Americans back to the Moon and then getting astronauts to Mars.
Founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musko, SpaceX has overtaken its long-time rival Boeing, whose manned flight program has stalled since the Starliner unmanned test launch last year.
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