The day after a sky-lighting Florida launch, four astronauts aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule closed in on the International Space Station Thursday, on track for docking and the start of half-year stay aboard the orbital outpost.
Crew-3 commander Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, Kayla Barron and German astronaut Matthias Maurer began the close approach phase of a 22-hour rendezvous shortly after wakeup around 2 p.m. EST.
The flight plan called for the fully automated Crew Dragon “Endurance,” making its first flight, to approach the station from behind and below, looping up to a point directly in front of the lab before moving in for an early evening docking.
Waiting to welcome their new crewmates aboard were Expedition 66 commander Anton Shkaplerov, cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei. They’ve had the station to themselves since Monday when four other astronauts departed and returned to Earth aboard their own Crew Dragon.
Chari and his crewmates blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center Wednesday night, 10 days late because of bad weather, a minor medical issue with one of the astronauts and a decision by NASA to bring the departing crew home Monday before launching their replacements.
Before going to bed early Thursday, Chari and his crewmates took time to downlink live television views of the Crew Dragon’s interior, describing the climb to orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket and life aboard Endurance.
“It’s been a wonderful ride up here, incredible experience,” Marshburn said. “Falcon gave us a very, very smooth ride, we were all surprised at how much we were able to feel the acceleration at first, which was very smooth, but then the throttle down and throttle back up again.”
About half the men and women who fly in space suffer from space adaptation syndrome, a temporary but uncomfortable malady caused by the body’s response to the absence of gravity.
Marshburn is a spaceflight veteran, but his three crewmates are making their first flight. He said all of them are healthy and eating heartily.
“One of the most delightful things about being in space is eating, and everybody’s been feeling really good,” he said. “We’ve enjoyed the food, we’ve already had two meals, which is kind of surprising. The new folks on the crew have been handling the food just fantastic, we’ve not had any disasters at all.”
He said astronauts are “encouraged to play with our food” and that “we’ve already had some target practice with macadamia nuts.”
“So far, I’d say we’ve been fairly successful. The life support system is still good,” he joked, “and all the important parts have no food particles on them.”
Barron showed off the crew’s zero-gravity indicator, a small stuffed turtle named Pfau, the German word for peacock. Barron and Chari are members of an astronaut class nicknamed the “Turtles” while Marshburn was a “Peacock.” The German nickname added Maurer to the mix.
As for the cuisine on board, “we spent a lot of our extra time in quarantine in the past week eating a lot,” Barron said, “so we’re well prepared to come up here and eat a little bit more.”
While the astronauts were obviously feeling good in the early hours of their adaptation to weightlessness, Chari requested a private medical conference, or PMC, when offered the option. “We’ll take the PMC,” he radioed flight controllers, “we do have a few things to report.”
NASA does not discuss astronaut medical issues and PMCs are just that, conducted in private.
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