NEW YORK, August 27. /TASS/. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying the Crew-7 mission has docked to the International Space Station (ISS, according to a NASA broadcast.
The Crew-7 includes Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov, along with NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa. They will be able to enter the space station in about 90 minutes. Their mission is expected to last for around six months.
The spaceship was blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida on Saturday.
Borisov is the third Roscosmos cosmonaut to set off for the ISS on a Crew Dragon mission under a Russian-US seat-swap agreement. Last October, Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina arrived at the ISS on NASA’s Crew-5 mission, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev was part of the Crew-6 mission that launched to the orbital outpost in March.
On July 15, Russia’s Roscosmos State Space Agency announced the signing of a seat-swap agreement with NASA, which provided for three flights of Russian cosmonauts to the ISS on US spacecraft. Roscosmos said in the spring that the agreement had been extended to one more mission. Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin is expected to fly to the ISS on the Crew-8 mission in the first half of 2024.
The current crew on board the ISS includes Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin (TASS special correspondent on the ISS) and Andrey Fedyaev, as well as NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, and Emirati astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi.