Four astronauts, three from NASA and a fourth from the European Space Agency, have arrived at the International Space Station where their capsule, a SpaceX Crew Dragon, is docked in the laboratory to begin a six-month science mission.
This came about 21 hours after the team launched into a capsule on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Wednesday evening, after repeated delays due to bad weather that delayed takeoff by a week and a half, according to Reuters.
It docked with the station at about 2330 GMT while the Crew Dragon spacecraft, dubbed Endurance, and the space station were hovering 420 kilometers above the eastern Caribbean Sea, NASA said.
The crew consists of three American astronauts from NASA, veteran astronauts Tom Marchburne, 61, Raja Chari, 44, and Kayla Baron, 34, in addition to German Matthias Maurer, 51, of the European Space Agency.
The three astronauts on the station greeted them with a hug: Russians Peter Dubrov and Oleg Novitsky and Major Mark High of NASA.
The new team is officially described as Crew 3 and is the third "working" crew NASA has sent with SpaceX to the International Space Station.
It wasn’t the most comfortable ride back. The toilet in their capsule was broken, and so the astronauts needed to rely on diapers for the eight-hour trip home. They shrugged it off late last week as just one more challenge in their mission.