Crew Dragon capsule and astronauts reach the ISS
Steph Deschamps / November 12, 2021
The four astronauts who left Cape Canaveral on Wednesday with a SpaceX rocket arrived safely at the ISS, the International Space Station, on Thursday, around 00:30. This is what the American space agency NASA said on Thursday night, about twenty hours after the departure of the quartet.
The Crew-3 crew members are Americans Thomas Marshburn (61), Raja Chari (44) and Kayla Barron (34) and German Matthias Maurer (51), who represents the European Space Agency (ESA). Thomas Marshburn is the sixth person in the world to have gone into space aboard three different spacecraft, while Matthias Maurer the second ESA astronaut to pilot a Crew Dragon.
The astronauts will remain on board the ISS for six months. According to the current schedule, they should return to Earth at the end of April. Less than 48 hours before the launch, another Crew Dagron capsule landed in the Gulf of Mexico, carrying in reverse four astronauts who spent six months on the ISS. Among them, the French ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet. This is the fourth time in history that a commercial rocket takes astronauts to the International Space Station. Its departure had been postponed several times in recent weeks due to medical problems and bad weather.