The SpaceX Dragon, with Expedition 69 crew members Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg of NASA, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev aboard, has successfully docked to the forward port of the Harmony module of the International Space Station at 8:01 a.m. EDT.
This was the 27th spacecraft relocation in space station history. The move made room for the arrival of the uncrewed SpaceX Dragon carrying cargo to station as part of the company’s 28th commercial resupply services mission for NASA, targeted to launch in June.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 members are scheduled to return to Earth in August.
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.
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Why does the entire crew have to be aboard the capsule for a redocking?
The crew ships launch and return crew members back and forth from the station. The crew ships also act as “life boats” in case of an unlikely emergency requiring evacuation of the space station. The same crew that launched to space on Crew Dragon also boarded the crew ship for the redocking maneuver to ensure no one is stranded aboard the space station in the event of an emergency.
It is stated that: This was the 27th spacecraft relocation in space station history.
The list here: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/visiting-vehicle-launches-arrivals-and-departures/
contains 24 Relocation events.
Please, could you share some details about three missing events of Relocation?
Sure and thanks for the catch. The page has now been updated. Two of the relocation events were the robotic relocation of the HTV-2 Kounotori vehicle on Feb. 18, 2011 and again on March 10, 2011. The third relocation event is listed as two separate events, an undocking and redocking, since the relocation maneuver lasted just over a day. The Progress 78 vehicle undocked from the Poisk module at 7:42 p.m. EDT on Oct. 20, 2021, went into station-keeping mode about 120 miles away from the station, then redocked to the Nauka science module at 12:21 a.m. on Oct. 22.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2021/10/20/russian-cargo-craft-undocks-from-station-to-switch-ports/
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2021/10/22/russian-cargo-craft-redocked-to-station/