Space station gets crowded as new crew makes an entrance

Four new crew members arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday, Aug. 2, temporarily increasing its population to 11. The quick trip from Kennedy Space Center in Florida took only 15 hours to reach the ISS.

NASA’s Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japan’s Kimiya Yui, and Russia’s Oleg Platonov are scheduled to spend at least six months aboard the orbiting laboratory, replacing fellow astronauts who have been on the station since March. SpaceX is expected to return those four astronauts to Earth as early as Wednesday, Aug. 6.

Fincke marked the crew’s arrival by radioing, “Hello, space station” as their capsule docked. Cardman later described her first glimpse of the station.

“It was such an unbelievably beautiful sight to see the space station come into our view for the first time,” she said.

The crew’s assignments shifted following a series of complications. Cardman and another astronaut were moved from a SpaceX flight last year to accommodate NASA’s two stranded astronauts, Boeing Starliner test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. They were supposed to stay one week. That stay stretched to more than nine months.

Fincke and Yui, originally set to fly the next Starliner mission, switched to SpaceX when Starliner was grounded by thruster and other issues until at least 2026. Platonov was reassigned after being bumped from a Soyuz launch a few years ago due to an undisclosed illness.

Back in June, Axiom Space launched its fourth private mission to the International Space Station in partnership with SpaceX for the flight. That crew consisted of astronauts from India, Poland, Hungary and the United States, marking a historic first visit to the ISS for the three international participants. They spent a short time on the ISS before returning to Earth on July 15.

While the new crew’s journey was considered fast by the United States’ standards, Russian spacecraft still hold the record for the quickest trip to the space station at three hours.