This joint flight between the United States and Russia was particularly symbolic in the midst of the war in Ukraine. “We can’t wait to get to work,” said American astronaut Nicole Mann shortly after docking the spacecraft with the Space Station (ISS). It was SpaceX’s fifth regular mission to the ISS on behalf of NASA, but the first to carry a Russian cosmonaut. In addition to Anna Kikina and Nicole Mann, the crew called Crew-5 is also made up of Japanese Koichi Wakata, and American astronaut Josh Cassada. The SpaceX rocket took off on Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, propelling the Dragon capsule into space. This ship slowly approached the ISS on Thursday, after a long journey of about 30 hours. Members of Crew-5 will spend about five months in this flying laboratory, some 400 kilometers above sea level. They join the seven people already on board (two Russians, four Americans and an Italian). A few days of handover are planned with the four members of Crew-4, before they are sent back to Earth. They must land off the American coast, on a date that has yet to be specified. Two weeks ago, an American took off for the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. This long-planned astronaut exchange program has been maintained despite the very high tensions between the United States and Russia since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Ensuring the operation of the ISS has thus become one of the very few subjects of cooperation between the two countries. (Belga)
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