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Roscosmos CEO congratulates NASA chief on Crew Dragon’s docking to ISS

Dmitry Rogozin also asked the NASA chief to convey congratulations to Elon Musk and the SpaceX team and expressed the hope for further cooperation

Chief of Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin Aleksey Nikolsky/Russian President Press Service/TASS

Chief of Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin

© Aleksey Nikolsky/Russian President Press Service/TASS

MOSCOW, May 31. /TASS/. Chief of Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin has congratulated NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and SpaceX founder Elon Musk on successful docking of the Crew Dragon manned spacecraft with the International Space Station (ISS) and said he liked Musk’s ‘trampoline’ quip.

"Dear Jim Bridenstine, it's safe to congratulate you at this point with a successful launch [of Crew Dragon] and docking [to ISS]. Bravo! I know how anxious you were for this major event to become a success. I wish NASA team to successfully finish up reconstructing its national space transportation system," he wrote on his Twitter account.

He also asked the NASA chief to convey congratulations to Elon Musk and the SpaceX team and expressed the hope for further cooperation. He also noted he liked Musk’s quip about a trampoline.

"The trampoline is working," Musk said at a news conference after the Crew Dragon launch obviously referring to Rogozin’s tweet about a trampoline. The Roscosmos chief wrote on his Twitter account he has saved Russia’s space sector from US sanctions back in 2014 when he had offered the United States to take astronauts to the ISS by means of a trampoline.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft with Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on board successfully docked to the International Space Station (ISS on Sunday. Crew Dragon was launched using the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on May 30 from the Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Crew Dragon is a configuration of the cargo spacecraft Dragon, which had already delivered cargoes to the ISS. A Falcon-9 rocket put the cargo vehicle in space on March 2. Its docking with the ISS was carried out automatically the next day.

NASA stopped crewed flights in 2011 after the Space Shuttle program came to an end. From that moment on all astronauts were delivered to the ISS and back by Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. Originally the Untied States was to start using commercial spacecraft for crewed missions in 2017.

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