Crew Dragon crewmembers enter ISS - NASA

WASHINGTON. Sept 30 (Interfax) - The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft has docked with the International Space Station (ISS), and its crew, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, has entered the ISS, NASA said.

The spacecraft automatically docked with the Harmony module of the ISS U.S. segment at 5:30 p.m. EST on Sunday (12:30 a.m. on Monday). Hatches between the ISS and the spacecraft opened in about 1.5 hours, and the crew entered the ISS.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew 9 mission took off from Area 40 of the U.S. Space Forces' complex on Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Friday.

The crew was reduced from four to two members in order to bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, members of the troubled Boing Starliner trial mission, back to Earth.

While approaching the ISS in early June, the Starliner spacecraft experienced problems with its maneuvering engines and had a helium leak in the service module. It undocked from the ISS on September 7 for an unmanned flight, and automatically landed in New Mexico.

Crew 9 mission will last for about five months and end in February 2025. Hague and Gorbunov will return to Earth together with Wilmore and Williams, whose mission was supposed to last for eight days only.

In July 2022, Roscosmos and NASA signed an agreement to perform flights of three Russian cosmonauts by U.S. Crew Dragon spacecraft and three U.S. astronauts by Russian Soyuz MS spaceships in 2022-2024.

In December 2023, Roscosmos said the agreement with NASA had been extended until 2025. Roscosmos Executive Director for Unmanned Space Programs Sergei Krikalev told Interfax back then that the supplementary agreement envisaged two more cross-flights to the ISS before 2025.