If the six-day demo goes well, SpaceX could launch two astronauts this summer under NASA’s commercial crew programme.

SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule has arrived at the International Space Station, acing its second milestone in just over a day.

No one was on board the capsule launched on Saturday on its first test flight, only an instrumented dummy. But the three station astronauts had front-row seats as the Dragon neatly docked on Sunday morning and became the first American-made, designed-for-crew spacecraft to pull up in eight years.

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If the six-day demo goes well, SpaceX could launch two astronauts this summer under NASA’s commercial crew programme. Both astronauts were at SpaceX Mission Control in California, observing all the action.

While SpaceX has sent plenty of cargo Dragons to the space station, a Crew Dragon is a different beast. It docked autonomously, instead of relying on the station’s robot arm for help.

The spacecraft will remain attached to the orbiting outpost for a week, before undocking on March 8 and splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Florida, several hours later.

The first @Commercial_Crew mission arrived at the space station today when the @SpaceX #CrewDragon completed soft capture on the Harmony module at 5:51am ET. #LaunchAmerica https://t.co/Bgcgac0O50 pic.twitter.com/KfNFpHxpGx — Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) March 3, 2019

Seven passengers

The spacecraft is designed to carry up to seven passengers to the space station, but for this flight, the capsule is loaded up with 450 pounds of cargo and a test dummy outfitted in one of SpaceX’s customised spacesuits.

The dummy is nicknamed Ripley, in honour of Ellen Ripley, the fictional character played by Sigourney Weaver in the 1979 film, Alien, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, revealed on Thursday in a pre-launch news briefing.

Last year, SpaceX sent another spacesuit-clad test dummy – this one named Starman in a nod to David Bowie – into space on the inaugural launch of the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon was developed in partnership with NASA to help the space agency replace its space shuttle fleet, which was retired in 2011.

Since then, NASA has been relying on Russian rockets and space capsules to ferry its astronauts to and from the space station, for a reported cost of $80m per journey.

In 2014, NASA awarded SpaceX and Boeing a combined $6.8bn contract to build a pair of new spacecraft. Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner capsule could undergo its first uncrewed test flight in April.