outer space
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The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 1:17 pm on Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the Dragon spacecraft, which finally docked at the station at 5:30 pm on Sunday.
The mission's two passengers, Crew-9, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, entered the ISS shortly after 7:00 p.m. and embraced their crewmates who were floating aboard the ISS.
When they return, scheduled for February, they must take astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams with them. They took off at the beginning of June on a new ship developed by Boeing, the Starliner, which was its first crewed test flight to the station.
The Starliner was initially scheduled to return them to Earth after eight days, but problems discovered in its propulsion system led NASA to question its reliability.
After long weeks of testing, the space agency finally returned an empty Boeing capsule and decided to return the castaways on the Crew-9 mission.
Billionaire Elon Musk's company regularly flies rotational missions for the International Space Station crew.
Crew-9's liftoff was postponed from mid-August to the end of September to give NASA teams more time to decide on Boeing's spacecraft. The launch was then postponed again for a few days due to Hurricane Helen, which hit Florida this week.
In total, Nick Hague and Alexander Gorbunov will spend about five months on the ISS. Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, about eight months.
About 200 scientific experiments were planned to be conducted during Crew-9's stay aboard the flying laboratory.
