SpaceX’s Crew-8 Dragon Capsule Docked at the ISS Today (Mar. 5) at 2.28 am EST
Crew-8 sent four SpaceX astronauts - three from NASA and one Russian cosmonaut - to the orbiting ISS lab for a six-month stay.
(The International Space Station (ISS)) SpaceX’s Crew-8 astronaut mission arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) this morning (March 5th), with the mission’s Dragon capsule, Endeavour, docking at 2.28am EST (0728 GMT).
A photo of the ISS pictured from the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft during a fly around of the orbiting lab after it undocked on November 8, 2021, courtesy of the ISS on Instagram, @iss.
The four-person Crew-8 launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, March 3rd at 10.53pm EST (0353 GMT on Mar. 4).
Crew-8 is comprised of the mission’s commander, Matthew Dominick, a U.S. Navy pilot and member of NASA’s 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class; the mission’s pilot, Michael Barrett, a Board certified Internal and Aerospace Medicine practitioner who has previously spent a total of 212 days in space across two spaceflights; Mission Specialist Jeannette Epps, a former CIA agent who was selected by NASA as an astronaut in 2009; and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin.
The four Crew-8 astronauts will relieve the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-7 mission, who arrived at the ISS in August of 2023 and will journey home in March.
Crew-8 is the eighth operational mission that SpaceX is flying to the ISS for NASA.
NASA signed a similar commercial-crew deal to that it holds with SpaceX with aerospace company Boeing (NYSE: BA), which aims to launch astronauts on its new Starliner capsule for the first time next month, on a trial mission called Crew Flight Test, according to Space.com.
