Ovunc Kutlu
November 17, 2020•Update: November 17, 2020
ANKARA
Billionaire businessman Elon Musk's private rocket company SpaceX has successfully carried a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA announced on Tuesday.
In a statement, NASA said, the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience carrying NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, docked to the ISS at 11:01 p.m. EST Monday (0401 GMT Tuesday).
The four astronauts have joined the crew of Expedition 64 that includes NASA Flight Engineer Kate Rubins, ISS Commander Sergey Ryzhikov, and Flight Engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov from Russia, who had arrived at the station on Oct. 14.
The SpaceX Crew-1 lifted off Sunday on a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission is the first of crew missions NASA and SpaceX will jointly fly as part of the commercial crew program.
SpaceX's first Crew Dragon carried two NASA astronauts -- Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley -- to the ISS in May. The launch was the first crewed mission from the US since the last space shuttle flight in 2011.
