NASA has pulled together a great selection of video clips highlighting this week’s historic Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
The 180-second presentation (top) shows everything from the astronauts’ suiting-and-booting session to their arrival at the space station 27 hours after launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, November 15.
NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, together with Japan’s Soichi Noguchi of Japan’s JAXA space agency, traveled aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in the spacecraft’s first operational flight following a successful crewed test flight to the ISS over the summer.
On their journey to the ISS 250 miles above the surface of Earth, the astronauts took time out to give space fans a quick tour of the Crew Dragon capsule as it traveled through space.
The Crew Dragon docked with the space station on Monday, November 16. A short while later, the Crew-1 astronauts transferred from the capsule to the space station, greeting NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who have been on board the orbiting outpost since October.
Speaking last week about NASA’s renewed ability to launch and land space crews domestically for the first time since the space shuttle program ended in 2011, Crew Dragon commander Michael Hopkins said he and his fellow astronauts were “truly honored” to be “starting this new era where we’re going to rotate crews to the International Space Station from American soil with our commercial partners, like SpaceX.”
Elon Musk, the man who founded privately operated SpaceX 18 years ago with the bold aim of creating a reusable rocket system for more cost-effective space travel, said recently that SpaceX engineers had worked “incredibly hard” to develop the “first commercial human spaceflight system in history,” adding, “The breakthrough will inspire confidence in our endeavor to return to the moon, travel to Mars, and ultimately help humanity become multi-planetary.”
The current Expedition 64 crew will spend the next six months living and working aboard the space station. You can find out more about how astronauts work, rest, and play aboard the ISS by checking out these videos made by past visitors to the station. And yes, you’ll even get to see how astronauts use the bathroom in space.
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