High above northwestern Australia, a robotic arm on the International Space Station grabbed onto a cargo capsule floating 10 meters away.

With that penultimate act, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., or SpaceX, made history as the first private company to send a craft, the Dragon, to the station.

The grab — which NASA refers to as a grapple — occurred at 9:56 a.m. Eastern time on Friday.

“It looks like we’ve got us a Dragon by the tail,” said Donald R. Pettit, the NASA astronaut on the station who was operating the robotic arm.

Andre Kuipers, an European Space Agency astronaut, then took over the robotic arm to pull the Dragon to a docking port on the station, locking it there just after noon. After the hatches are opened on Saturday, the astronauts aboard the station will spend six days unloading the cargo brought up by the Dragon and replacing it with items to take back to Earth. The Dragon is to undock on Thursday and parachute into the Pacific Ocean off California.