New Delhi: India’s Shubhanshu Shukla and three other astronauts entered the International Space Station (ISS) to warm hugs and handshakes on Thursday as the Dragon spacecraft docked to the orbital laboratory after a 28-hour journey around Earth.
The new spacecraft — fifth in the Dragon series, named Grace — achieved a soft capture with the Harmony module of the space station at 4:01 pm IST over the North Atlantic Ocean and it took another two hours to establish communication, power links and pressure stabilisation.
This is the first time an Indian astronaut has travelled to the ISS.
“The #Ax4 crew — commander Peggy Whitson, ISRO astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, ESA astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, and mission specialist Tibor Kapu — emerges from the Dragon spacecraft and gets their first look at their home in low Earth orbit,” the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a post on X.
“We are happy to be here. It was a long quarantine,” Whitson, who is on her fifth spaceflight, said as the four astronauts waved to the mission control at Houston.
A live video link from the NASA showed the spacecraft approaching the space station. The docking sequence was completed at 4:15 pm IST.
After the more-than-28-hour journey since its launch from Florida at 12:01 hours on Wednesday, the Dragon spacecraft began a slow and measured approach by firing on thrusters to prepare for a rendezvous with the space station.
The spacecraft moved swiftly through the intricate manoeuvres, prompting the mission control to skip two halts at “waypoint-1” and “waypoint-2”, which advanced the docking by nearly 30 minutes.
Just 20 metres from the space station, the spacecraft made its final approach, using a suite of laser-based sensors and cameras, aligned precisely with the docking port on the Harmony module of the orbital laboratory.
After the soft capture of the spacecraft, the hard-mating was completed when the two orbiting bodies were connected with 12 sets of hooks with each other and communication and power links were established.
The space station crew performed the mandatory leak checks and hatch-opening procedures to ensure that the pressure inside the Dragon spacecraft was the same as on the ISS — matching the pressure levels at the sea level on Earth.
Whitson, a veteran astronaut, floated into the space station at 5:53 pm IST, followed by Shukla, Slawosz and Kapu.
Shukla, a test pilot with the Indian Air Force, is the second Indian to go to space and the first since Rakesh Sharma’s eight-day sojourn in 1984.
Polish engineer Slawosz, a mission specialist and a European Space Agency project astronaut, will be the second person from his country to travel to space and the first since 1978.
Kapu, a mechanical engineer and the mission specialist, will be the second Hungarian astronaut to rocket into space. Hungary’s last space mission was 45 years ago.
The space station has seven astronauts — Nicole Ayers, Anne McClain and Jonny Kim from the NASA, Takuya Onishi from the JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Roscosmos cosmonauts Kirill Peskov, Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky.
