SpaceX's Crew-10 astronaut mission has arrived at the International Space Station, ending a 28-hour orbital chase.
Crew-10 launched on Friday evening (March 14) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, sending four astronauts from three different nations toward the orbiting lab.
Crew-10's Crew Dragon capsule, named Endurance, caught up with the station early Sunday morning (March 16), docking with its Harmony module at 12:04 a.m. EDT (0404 GMT), while the two spacecraft were flying 260 miles (418 kilometers) above the Atlantic Ocean.
"It's such a great honor for us to be part of this program," Crew-10 mission specialist Takuya Onishi of JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) said shortly after docking. "We have a lot of exciting work ahead of us that we are looking forward to. Again, thank you very much to everybody who helped us to get here."
The hatches between Endurance and the International Space Station (ISS) opened at 1:35 a.m. EDT (0535 GMT), and the Crew-10 astronauts floated aboard the orbiting lab about 10 minutes later.
Those new arrivals are Onishi, NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, and Kirill Peskov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
McClain is the Crew-10 commander. Ayers is the pilot, and Onishi and Peskov are mission specialists. The quartet will stay aboard the ISS for about six months, the usual duration for crew rotations.
Related: Meet the astronauts of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission
The Crew-10 astronauts will relieve four folks who have been living on the ISS for a while now — NASA's Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Roscosmos' Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Hague and Gorbunov arrived at the station in late September, on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission. Williams and Wilmore have been in orbit since early June, when they launched on the first crewed mission of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.
Starliner's mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so, but the capsule suffered thruster problems and was eventually brought home uncrewed in early September. NASA retasked Williams and Wilmore to a long-term ISS mission and took two astronauts off the Crew-9 launch to accommodate them on the way home.
Hague, Williams, Wilmroe and Gorbunov will come back to Earth in the Crew-9 Dragon no earlier than Wednesday (March 19), NASA officials said after the Crew-10 launch.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:10 a.m. ET on March 16 with news of successful docking, then again at 1:55 a.m. ET with news of hatch opening.
