The four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-11 mission have arrived at their orbital destination.
Crew-11’s Crew Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday at 2:26 a.m. EDT (0626 GMT), less than 15 hours after it launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast.
The hatches between the two spacecraft are expected to open around 4:45 a.m. EDT (0845 GMT), and a welcome ceremony will take place about an hour after that.
The docking occurred five years to the day after the splashdown of SpaceX‘s first-ever crewed mission, the Demo-2 test flight, which sent NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS for a two-month stay. Demo-2 also employed the Crew Dragon Endeavour.
Crew-11 is commanded by NASA astronaut Zena Cardman. Her crewmates are fellow NASA spaceflyer Mike Fincke, who’s the Crew-11 pilot, Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Oleg Platonov of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos. The latter are both mission specialists.
This is the first spaceflight for Cardman and Platonov, the second for Yui and the fourth for Fincke. And it’s the sixth trip into the final frontier for Endeavour, SpaceX’s most-flown crew capsule.
The Crew-11 quartet are joining seven people aboard the orbiting lab: JAXA’s Takuya Onishi, commander of the station’s current Expedition 73 mission; Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers and Jonny Kim of NASA; and cosmonauts Kirill Peskov, Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky.
The Crew-11 astronauts will relieve Ayers, McClain, Onishi and Peskov, who arrived at the ISS in mid-March on SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission. The Crew-10 quartet will head back home to Earth a few days from now, after spending some time and sharing some knowledge with their Crew-11 counterparts.
As its name indicates, Crew-11 is the 11th operational astronaut mission SpaceX has flown to the ISS for NASA. SpaceX also has eight other crewed flights under its belt — Demo-2, four private efforts to the orbiting lab operated by the Houston company Axiom Space, and three free-flying missions to orbit (Inspiration4, Polaris Dawn and Fram2).
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 3:30 a.m. ET on Aug. 2 with news of successful docking.