Four astronauts on a SpaceX flight have successfully arrived at the International Space Station after an historic 27 hour mission to the stars.
The Crew Dragon capsule docked at 11.01pm EST (4.01 GMT) today after launching on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida in the early hours of Monday morning.
The newly designed spacecraft from billionaire Elon Musk, dubbed Resilience by its crew of three Americans and one Japanese astronaut, is the first crewed mission on a privately built space capsule.
Dramatic footage showed the successful launch yesterday, which had been delayed due to concerns over poor weather conditions.
Entrepreneur Musk was forced to miss seeing the takeoff in person after saying he had tested positive for coronavirus.
Their destination was the space station, an orbital laboratory about 250 miles above Earth, which will be their home for the next six months.
After that another set of astronauts on a Crew Dragon capsule will replace them and the rotation will continue until Boeing joins the program with its own spacecraft late next year.
The Resilience crew includes Crew Dragon commander Mike Hopkins and two fellow NASA astronauts, mission pilot Victor Glover and physicist Shannon Walker.
They are joined by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, making his third trip to space after previously flying on the US shuttle in 2005 and Soyuz in 2009.
Another US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts are aboard the space station from a previous mission.
"Welcome to the ISS," said Kate Rubins, a US astronaut already on the space station. "We can't wait to have you onboard."
Before receiving its flight certification from NASA last week, SpaceX's Crew Dragon had been under development for roughly a decade under a public-private NASA program started in 2011 to revive the agency's human spaceflight capability.
