OREANDA-NEWS The Crew Dragon spacecraft of the American company SpaceX with four astronauts on board at 19:37 (East coast time) docked to the International Space Station (ISS). The broadcast is carried out on the website of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Approximately ten minutes after docking, the broadcast host reported that the ship was fully secured to the ISS docking node. The docking took place in automatic mode.

The launch of the spacecraft was carried out on Wednesday at 03:55 (East coast time) from the spaceport at Cape Canaveral (Florida). The crew of Crew Dragon, dubbed Freedom, includes NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Robert Hines and Jessica Watkins, as well as a representative of the European Space Agency (ESA), Italian Samantha Cristoforetti. This is the fourth rotation of the ISS crew from the American side within the framework of NASA's cooperation with SpaceX.

Lindgren, Hines, Watkins and Cristoforetti will replace fellow Americans Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron and German Matthias Maurer, who flew to the station on a Crew Dragon called Endurance on November 11 last year and will return to Earth on it in late April or early May. NASA has not announced the date of undocking yet. For Hines and Watkins, this is the first flight into space, for Lindgren and Cristoforetti — the second.