The SpaceX launch was first planned to be on May 27 but was scrubbed due to bad weather. The weather cleared and the SpaceX Crew Dragon has reached the station on Sunday, May 31 at 10:17 A.M., with a slow approach and crawl gradually bringing it in for gentle contact with the orbiting space laboratory.
“We have to congratulate the men and women of SpaceX,” Hurley said after the docking. “Their incredible efforts over the last several years to make this possible cannot go overstated.”
Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were the two American astronauts who boarded the International Space Station from a SpaceX capsule. This is the first-time humans have traveled to orbit on a commercially developed craft. This is a whole new era for NASA and Elon Musk have started. Both astronauts announced they had named their spacecraft Endeavour. The milestone flight is the first time American astronauts have flown from the U.S. in a private human spacecraft. This event became a reality 18 years after Musk founded intending to populate other planets. It sounds like something crazy but this seems to be a reality in a near future.
SpaceX has reached the station at 10:17 A.M. and three hours later, at 1:22 P.M. Bob and Doug finally entered the space station after checks had been completed and the air pressure between the capsule and the space station had been equalized. A historic ride to the ISS, which took almost a day for the spacecraft to reach the ISS after launching, and in many occasions, astronauts were taking the control to test out the spacecraft's maneuverability.
Bob and Doug, together with SpaceX will stay for 1 and 4 months, depending on the progress made with the next mission. SpaceX’s Crew-1 is expected to launch in August.
As Hurley said, this is an incredible time to be at NASA, and it also represents a new era for the spaceflight. In 2012, SpaceX was the first commercial cargo spacecraft reaching the space station. In a near-future customers may be able to travel to the ISS with a cost of $20 million a seat on Crew Dragon.
