New crew makes the quickest US flight to ISS
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in the US state of FloridaImage: Philip Scott Andrews/REUTERSAdvertisementFour astronauts docked at the International Space Station (ISS) port on Thursday after completing the fastest flight by a US spacecraft to the outpost, NASA officials said.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Crew-13 aboard, lifted off at 11:10 a.m. local time (1510 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and within 7 hours and 55 minutes, its capsule, SpaceX Dragon "Grace," docked at the ISS — setting a record for a US trip to the ISS.
The flight by the spacecraft was the quickest so far, not only for Elon Musk's company, but for any American entity, including NASA.
The time taken for a trip to the ISS mainly depends on the distance between the ISS and the spacecraft at the time of launch.
The space station's convenient location allowed the spacecraft to reach it faster.
The last crew, which took off from the United States, took more than 30 hours to reach the station.
A Russian Soyuz spacecraft set the overall record for a flight to the ISS in October 2020, reaching the station in just over three hours.
The new ISS crew was set to arrive in mid-September, however, its flight was delayed due to a leak aboard the Dragon.
Watkins, the Crew-13's commander, became the first Black woman to lead a crew to orbit. The crew is slated to stay at the ISS for six months and will be replacing Crew-12, which is set to return to Earth on Monday.
Despite many international cooperation agreements collapsing after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the United States and other ISS partners still work with Russia on the space station.
The ISS has been continuously in use for the last 25 years. NASA has committed to operating it through 2030.
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