SpaceX Crew Dragon docks with International Space Station

March 5, 2019

The Crew Dragon capsule of Space X has successfully docked with the International Space Station.

SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule

The demonstration mission is named as Demo-1.
It was a test mission before it can begin taking US astronauts into space.
After the successful docking, the crew members of International Space Station opened the hatch of the space capsule and, for the first time, penetrated its interior in space.
The Dragon Capsule had carried Ripley, a test dummy named after the heroine from Alien Movies, an untethered plush toy, 400 pounds (about 181 kg) of supplies and experiments to the ISS.
During the mission, Flight computers guided the spacecraft directly into a docking port, unlike the previous cargo Dragon spacecraft that were attached to the space station after captured by a robotic arm.

International Space Station
The International Space Station is a habitable artificial satellite in low Earth orbit. The ISS maintains an orbit with an altitude of between 330 and 435 km (205 and 270 mi) by means of reboost manoeuvres and circles the Earth in roughly 92 minutes and completes 15.5 orbits per day
The ISS programme is a joint project between five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada).

Demo-1 was a dress rehearsal to demonstrate that the vehicle is reliable and safe so that NASA can resume manned flights from US soil this year and reduce its reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the space station since the end of the US space shuttle program in 2011 after a 30-year run.

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