CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida. SpaceX successfully delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday, completing the trip just 15 hours after liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
The multinational crew includes NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan’s Kimiya Yui, and Russia’s Oleg Platonov. They arrived aboard a SpaceX capsule and are expected to stay aboard the orbiting laboratory for at least six months, replacing the current crew who have been there since March. SpaceX is set to bring that crew back to Earth as early as Wednesday.
“Hello, space station!” Fincke radioed upon docking, as the capsule approached the ISS high above the South Pacific.
All four astronauts were originally assigned to different missions. Cardman had previously been pulled from a SpaceX flight last year to accommodate two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, whose Boeing Starliner mission was unexpectedly extended to over nine months due to technical issues.
Fincke and Yui were initially training for future Starliner missions, but due to continuing problems with Boeing’s spacecraft, which is now grounded until at least 2026, they were reassigned to SpaceX. Platonov was previously removed from Russia’s Soyuz launch schedule due to an undisclosed illness.
Their arrival temporarily increases the ISS crew to 11 members.
“It was such an unbelievably beautiful sight to see the space station come into our view for the first time,” Cardman said after boarding the station.
While the 15-hour trip was fast by U.S. standards, Russia still holds the record for the fastest ISS journey, completing one in just three hours.
Edgardo Hernal started college at UP Diliman and received his BA in Economics from San Sebastian College, Manila, and Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University in Oak Brook, IL. He has 25 years of copy editing and management experience at Thomson West, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
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