SpaceX NASA mission astronaut capsule set to dock with space station
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US astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will dock to the International Space Station (ISS) later.
The men are making their way up to the orbiting platform after their launch on a Falcon-9 rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Saturday.
The Nasa crew are now travelling in a Dragon capsule supplied and operated by a private company, SpaceX – a first in the history of human spaceflight.
Their ship is due to attach to the ISS at around 14:30 GMT.
It will be a fully automated procedure; Hurley and Behnken won’t need to intervene unless there is a problem.
Earlier, the two carried out what has become a tradition among US spacefarers – the naming of their ship. This tradition goes right back to the Mercury capsule programme in the early 1960s.
The two men said their Dragon would be called “Capsule Endeavour”.
Hurley radioed to Earth: “We chose Endeavour for a few reasons: One, because of this incredible endeavour that Nasa, SpaceX and the US have been on since the end of the shuttle programme back in 2011.
“The other reason is a little more personal to Bob and I. We both had our first flights on shuttle Endeavour and it just meant so much to us to carry on that name.”
Shuttle Endeavour, retired nine years ago with the rest of Nasa’s orbiter fleet, was named after HMS Endeavour, the research ship commanded by British explorer James Cook on his voyage to Australia and New Zealand in the late 18th Century.
