MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 03rd March, 2019) The newest US spacecraft Dragon 2 successfully docked to the International Space Station (ISS), NASA said on Sunday.
"Capture confirmed! After making 18 orbits of Earth since its launch, @SpaceX's #CrewDragon spacecraft successfully attached to the @Space_Station via 'soft capture' at 5:51am ET [10.51 GMT] while the station was traveling just north of New Zealand," NASA said on Twitter.
According to a broadcast on the NASA website, after the docking, the ISS crew reported a warning alert on the Russian ISS segment, which indicated failure of Electron-VM oxygen generation system located in Zvezda module. Later, however, it turned out that it was a false alarm.
Russian state space corporation Roscosmos congratulated NASA on the successful docking of Dragon 2 to the ISS.
"Roscosmos congratulates colleagues from NASA on the successful test docking of the new spacecraft and stresses that flight safety must be immaculate. The state corporation welcomes the development of mutual relations in space exploration and expresses confidence that cooperation will develop," Roscosmos said on Twitter.
In its turn, Russian private space company S7 Space, which owns the Sea Launch marine-based spaceport, published its own congratulations to SpaceX.
"Congratulations to #SpaceX on the successful launch and docking of the Dragon Crew to the #ISS. The new era of the manned spaceflight has begun!" S7 Space said on Facebook.
Dragon 2, also known as Crew Dragon, embarked, atop the Falcon 9 rocket, on its first unmanned test mission to the ISS from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, at 2:49 a.m. EST (07:49 GMT) on Saturday.
SpaceX has created Crew Dragon under a contract with NASA on the basis of its space freighter Dragon, which has been making flights to the ISS since 2012. The device is designed for a crew of seven.
The Russian side previously expressed concerns about the safety of the new spacecraft's docking. According to NASA, Russian experts were dissatisfied with the absence of an additional electronic-based system of emergency prevention of the spacecraft's collision with the ISS.
On Friday, Sergey Krikalev, the executive director for manned space flights at Roscosmos, told Sputnik that NASA has changed, upon Russia's request, the trajectory of the docking of US spacecraft Dragon 2 with the US segment of the ISS in order to ensure safety during approach and docking.
Russian Mission Control Center and the operational control group of the Russian segment of the ISS oversaw the docking process according to the protocol, which states that if the approach mode deviates from the standard, the docking attempt will be terminated.
According to Roscosmos, the parties decided to close four hatches in the US segment of the ISS for the time of docking. In the event of an emergency, the crew was projected to evacuate first to the Russian segment of the ISS, and then to the Soyuz MS-11 spacecraft.
It was planned that Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko would to visit the unmanned Dragon 2 spacecraft upon docking to take air samples.
