The C206 Endeavor spacecraft, on its 3rd mission to space, docked at the 'zenith' port of the International Space Station's Harmony module.
On Saturday, April 9, 2022. The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft “Endeavour” autonomously docked with the International Docking Adapter (IDA-3) of the PMA-3 adapter from the station's Harmony module at 12:29 UTC (08:29 EDT) in slick mode; The firm docking was completed at 08:32 EDT, and was carried out as part of the Ax-1 commercial mission of the company Axiom Space. The final stage of the spacecraft's encounter with the ISS began at 07:45 EDT. The broadcast presenter confirmed the successful docking, which took place in automatic mode. In about an hour and a half, space tourists will be able to enter the station, where they will spend about eight days.
Rendezvous to ISS followed of almost 21 hours, Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy to International Space Station, flying about approx. 424 km above the central Atlantic Ocean.
Dragon Endeavour’s docking was delayed approximately 45 minutes as the space station teams, including mission controllers at NASA and SpaceX, worked to troubleshoot an issue preventing the crew members on station from receiving views from Dragon’s center line camera of the Harmony module's docking port. Mission teams worked to route video using a SpaceX ground station to the crew on the space station, allowing Dragon to proceed with docking. The broadcast presenter confirmed the successful docking, which took place in automatic mode.
The launch of the Falcon 9 v1.2 FT Block 5 carrier rocket with the spacecraft was carried out from the Cape Canaveral, Florida spaceport on Friday, and the trip to the ISS took less than a day. The crew includes three businessmen from the US, Israel and Canada – Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy. According to SpaceNews, they paid $55 million each. The crew commander is former American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria. He flew to the ISS at the expense of Axiom Space, of which he is vice president and chief astronaut. The Axiom crew are joining Expedition 67 crew members, including NASA astronauts Marshburn, Raja Chari, and Kayla Barron, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Matthias Maurer, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Sergey Korsokov, and Denis Matveev.
Comments