Kochi: After a 28-hour flight from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre, India’s Shubhanshu Shukla and three others reached the International Space Station on Thursday evening, media reports said.
The Crew Dragon capsule carrying four
astronauts traveled 28 hours covering 424 kms to join the International Space Station as part of the Axiom-4 mission.
“We are honored to be here… thank you,” Mission Commander Peggy Whitson told the International Space Station in a live stream of the docking.
It will take some more time for Shukla, Peggy Whitson (US), Slawoz Wisniewski (Poland) and Tibor Kapu (Hungary) to join the other seven on the ISS for technical reasons.
The hatch separating the ISS and the Dragon capsule will open at 6.10 pm (India time).
Axiom-4’s journey began at 12.01 pm Wednesday when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Launch Complex 39A, the same site, in fact, that launched Neil Armstrong and the Apollo 11 mission.
The launch was delayed six times before blasting off from the Launch Complex 39A, from the site that launched the Apollo 11 mission that took man to moon.
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The International Space Station (ISS) is a large space station that was assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies.
NASA (US), Roscosmos (Russia), ESA (Europe), JAXA (Japan), and CSA (Canada) are its contractors.
It primarily serves for conducting scientific experiments in microgravity and studying the space environment.
The launched on November, 20, 1998 (26 years ago) has a weight of 450,000 kg and length of 109 metres width of 73 metres.
Photo : X
Shukla docks with ISS
