NASA Television and the agency’s website are providing live continuous coverage of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission carrying NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, along with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet on their way to the International Space Station.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, began the final phase of its approach to the station at 3:31 a.m. EDT Saturday and is scheduled to dock at about 5:10 a.m. Crew Dragon is designed to dock autonomously, but the crew aboard the spacecraft and the space station will monitor the performance of the spacecraft as it approaches and docks to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module.
When the hatches open about 7:15 a.m. Saturday, April 24, the Crew-2 astronauts will join the Expedition 65 crew of Shannon Walker, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Mark Vande Hei of NASA, as well as Soichi Noguchi of JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov. For a short time, the number of crew on the space station will increase to 11 people until Crew-1 astronauts Walker, Hopkins, Glover, and Noguchi return a few days later.
Follow along and get more information about the mission at: http://www.nasa.gov/crew-2. Learn more about station activities by following the space station blog, @space_station and @ISS_Research on Twitter as well as the ISS Facebook and ISS Instagram accounts.