American manned spacecraft Crew Dragon on the night of Tuesday, November 17, successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS).

The flight from the cosmodrome at Cape Canaveral to the ISS lasted 27 hours. Docking to the American Harmony module is done in automatic mode.

Astronauts boarded the ISS.

Crew Dragon delivered three NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and their Japanese counterpart Soichi Noguchi to orbit. They will join the members of the 64th long-term expedition to the ISS, which includes Russian cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhikov, Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and NASA astronaut Kathleen Rubens..

It is expected that the Crew Dragon mission aboard the ISS will last six months, after which the descent capsule with astronauts should splash down in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX broke the Russian monopoly on the flight to the ISS Crew Dragon was launched under a commercial NASA contract with Elon Musk's private company SpaceX, which developed both the spacecraft and launched it into orbit with the Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

The Crew Dragon test flight to the ISS was completed in May 2020, and astronauts Douglas Harley and Robert Behnken became the first Americans to launch from the United States to the ISS after an almost 9-year hiatus..

Two more Crew Dragon manned flights to the ISS are planned for 2021. As part of one of them, the astronaut of the European Space Agency ESA Frenchman Thomas Piquet will go to the station. In addition, in the next 15 months, four unmanned flights will be carried out to deliver the necessary cargo to the station.. Reported by Deutsche Welle.