Soyuz Docks with Space Station on 37th Anniversary of First U.S.-Soviet Space Docking
The International Space Station (ISS) is back to its full complement of six crew members with the docking this morning of the Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft.
Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka, Sergei Revin and Yuri Malenchenko, American astronauts Joe Acaba and Suni Williams, and Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide, smiled for the cameras as Expedition 32 got down to work fully staffed.
The docking took place exactly 37 years after the first international human spaceflight docking — of a U.S. Apollo spacecraft and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft as part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975. Those spacecraft remained docked for only two days, a far cry from today’s permanently occupied space station era, with international crews rotating on roughly six-month schedules.
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