space travel
Replacement for astronaut Maurer: New crew arrives at the ISS
Astronaut Matthias Maurer will soon return to E-Earth. Photo: –/NASA/ESA-M.Maurer/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Now things are getting tight on the International Space Station ISS: A total of 11 astronauts are now stationed there – until some of them go back to Earth.
The replacement for the German astronaut Matthias Maurer is here: three Americans and one Italian have arrived at the International Space Station ISS.
The US astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins as well as Samantha Cristoforetti, astronaut of the European Space Agency ESA, docked with a “Crew Dragon” capsule at the ISS, as the US space agency Nasa announced.
Around 20 hours earlier, the four astronauts had started from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida. This is the fifth time that Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX has brought astronauts to the ISS on behalf of NASA. It was the first flight to the space station for Hines and Watkins and the second for Lindgren and Cristoforetti.
The so-called “Crew-4” is to replace the “Crew-3” currently stationed on board the ISS – in addition to the German astronaut Maurer, these are the US astronauts Thomas Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron. Until the return of “Crew-3” planned for the end of April, a total of eleven people will be stationed on the ISS for a short period of time, including cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov.