Overview
- The Dragon capsule Grace docked to the International Space Station after a roughly 7 hour 55 minute flight, the fastest docking by a U.S. spacecraft, NASA confirmed Thursday.
- The launch had been delayed about three weeks after technicians found and fixed a leak in Dragon’s propulsion system before setting a new liftoff date.
- The four-person Crew-13—commander Jessica Watkins, pilot Luke Delaney, Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Russian cosmonaut Serguéi Teteriátnikov—joined Expedition 75 and will take over station duties from Crew-12 after a short handover.
- Agencies plan to support personal needs during the mission, including arrangements for Kutryk, whose wife is due to give birth while he is in orbit, and maintain regular communications between the crew and families.
- Over the next six months the crew will run biomedical and space-agriculture experiments on the ISS while the flight highlights growing commercial crew services and ongoing international cooperation for low-Earth orbit operations.