NEW YORK, March 3. /TASS/. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying the Crew-6 mission docked to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, according to a live NASA TV broadcast.
The Crew-6 mission includes Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, along with NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, as well as the UAE’s Sultan Alneyadi. The Crew Dragon automatically docked to the Harmony module of the US segment of the ISS at 1:43 a.m. EST (9:43 a.m. Moscow time).
The docking was delayed for an hour due to technical issues. Crew members "are testing a software override for a faulty sensor on one hook," NASA wrote on Twitter.
On Thursday, the Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched the Crew-6 mission to the ISS from the Cape Canaveral space center in Florida. Fedyaev became Russia’s second cosmonaut to set off for the ISS on a Crew Dragon mission under the Russian-US cross-flight program. Last October, Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina arrived at the ISS on NASA’s Crew-5 mission.
The Crew-6 launch was originally scheduled for February 27, but it was scrubbed a few minutes prior to liftoff and postponed to March 2 due to a ground systems issue. On Wednesday, NASA experts said the spacecraft was ready for launch.
On Sunday, the Soyuz MS-23, the new ride home for Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin as well as NASA astronaut Francisco Rubio, docked to the Poisk module of the Russian segment of the ISS. The Soyuz MS-23, which is replacing the damaged Soyuz MS-22, is expected to land on September 27.
In mid-July, the Russian space agency announced the signing of an agreement on cross flights for Russian cosmonauts and US astronauts to the ISS, which stipulates that the Russians are to conduct three flights on board US spacecraft. On Wednesday, Roscosmos said the number of cross flights had been expanded to include another mission.