Dragon Berths with ISS on First Operational Commercial Cargo Mission
SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft successfully berthed with the International Space Station (ISS) this morning. ISS Commander and NASA astronaut Suni Williams “installed” Dragon onto its docking port on the Harmony module using Canadarm2 at 9:03 am ET. Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide had used Canadarm2 to grapple Dragon at 6:56 am ET.
Dragon was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday.
The hatch between Dragon and ISS is scheduled to open about 6:00 am ET tomorrow following efforts today to pressurize the vestibule between the two and install data and power cables. Dragon will remain attached to ISS for 18 days while the ISS crew unloads 882 pounds of supplies, science experiments and hardware and then reload it with 1,673 pounds of cargo for return to Earth. Unberthing and reentry is scheduled for October 28.
This is the first operational commercial cargo mission to the ISS, following SpaceX’s successful test mission in May.
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