Four New Crew Members Arrive at International Space Station

The U.S. space agency NASA says two U.S. astronauts, another from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and a Russian cosmonaut are safely aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after their Space-X Dragon crew capsule docked Friday with the orbiting laboratory.


Video from NASA showed U.S. astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev being greeted warmly by ISS crew members as they entered the space station about two hours after the docking.


The 41-year-old Alneyadi is the second person from his country to fly to space and the first to launch from U.S. soil as part of a long-duration space station team.


Space-X says the new crew members will spend six months on the station, where they will conduct more than 200 science experiments and technology demonstrations,


NASA says the docking was delayed slightly as mission teams completed troubleshooting of a faulty docking hook sensor on the Dragon capsule. They verified all of the docking hooks were properly configured, and the docking process continued.


The new crew members temporally expand the ISS crew to 11. They join the Expedition 68 crew, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann, and Josh Cassada, Japanese space agency, JAXA, astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin, and Anna Kikina. 

Some information for this report was provided by the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.