SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, carrying UAE astronaut docks with ISS after technical issue
SpaceX Crew 6 mission docked at the ISS approximately 24 hours since its launch on Thursday.
On board Crew 6 is Emirati astronaut Sultan Al-Neyadi who is the second Arab to carry out lengthy space mission.
NASA's Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Russia's Andrey Fedyaev all boarded the station about two hours later from docking, the livestream showed.
The crew will spend six months on the station, where they will conduct more than 200 science experiments and technology demonstrations, according to SpaceX.
The mission was the first space flight for Neyadi, Hoburg and Fedyaev.
Neyadi, 41, is the fourth astronaut from an Arab country and the second from the oil-rich UAE to journey to space.
Fedyaev is the second Russian cosmonaut to fly to the ISS aboard a SpaceX rocket. NASA astronauts fly regularly to the station on Russian Soyuz craft.
Space has remained a rare venue of cooperation between Moscow and Washington since the Russian offensive in Ukraine placed them in sharp opposition.
The Crew-6’s Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, lifted off at 12:34 a.m. EST on Thursday March 2, 2023, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first attempt to launch them was called off Monday at the last minute because of a clogged filter in the engine ignition system.
They will replace a US-Russian-Japanese crew that has been up there since October.
The other station residents are two Russians and an American whose six-month stay was doubled, until September, after their Soyuz capsule sprang a leak.
A replacement Soyuz arrived last weekend.
Al-Neyadi, a communications engineer, served as backup for the first Emirati astronaut, Hazzaa Al-Mansoori, who rode a Russian rocket to the space station in 2019 for a weeklong visit. The oil-rich federation paid for Al-Neyadi’s seat on the SpaceX flight.
Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman was the first Arab in space, launching aboard shuttle Discovery in 1985. He was followed two years later by Syrian astronaut Muhammed Faris, launched by Russia. Both were in space for about a week.
