The new mission of the Crew Dragon 3, which launched yesterday from the base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, has reached the International Space Station is proceeding according to plan.

The coupling between the two units went as expected.

The 4 astronauts aboard the SpaceX carrier - Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn and the German Matthias Maurer - will remain aboard the ISS for six months and will also receive two "tourist" missions: one with Japanese visitors aboard a spacecraft. Russian spacecraft Soyuz, at the end of the year, and then the Space-X Axiom crew, in February 2022.

Chari, a colonel in the US Air Force, commands the mission and is on his first journey into space, along with Barron and Maurer. Marshburn, a physician, flew aboard a space shuttle in 2009 and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on a 2012-13 mission. Barron, along with Chari was selected for NASA's astronaut corps in 2017.

THE MISSION - Crew-3 is part of NASA's multi-billion dollar partnership with SpaceX, signed after the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011 and with the aim of carrying out human space flights from the United States of America.

The quartet will spend six months on the ISS and conduct research to help inform future space exploration and benefit life on Earth.

Scientific highlights of the mission include an experiment to grow plants in space without soil or other growth media and another to build optical fibers in microgravity, which previous research has suggested will be of higher quality than those produced on Earth.

(Unioneonline / vl)