To the ISS in record time: astronauts reach the space station in under eight hours

dpa/afp | A US space capsule reached the International Space Station ISS in record time. Just 7 hours and 55 minutes after launch, the “Dragon” space capsule from the private space company SpaceX docked with the ISS - according to the US space agency NASA, this is the fastest time from launch to docking of a US spacecraft in the history of the ISS.

The group of four astronauts took off from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida on Thursday morning (local time).

Previously, US spacecraft had needed much longer to travel this distance. In August 2025, for example, a “Dragon” took 14 hours and 44 minutes. Russia is getting its cosmonauts to the ISS faster: According to the Guinness Book of Records, the current speed record from launch to docking is 3 hours and 3 minutes, set by the manned Soyuz MS-17 on October 14, 2020.

On board the current “Dragon” flight were NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Russian cosmonaut Sergei Teterjatnikov. According to NASA, the capsule docked with the “Harmony” module of the ISS at 7:05 p.m. local time (1:05 ​​a.m. CEST on Friday).

Watkins, Delaney, Kutryk and Teteryatnikov are expected to stay on the ISS for about six months. They replace the four astronauts of the Crew-12 mission - the US astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, the French Sophie Adenot and the Russian Andrei Fedjayev. After a transition phase lasting several days between the two crews, Crew-12 will return to Earth on Monday at the earliest, depending on weather conditions.

Crew-13 was actually supposed to fly to the ISS in mid-September. However, the launch was postponed due to a leak discovered on the spacecraft. The ISS is located approximately 400 kilometers above Earth. It is one of the last areas of international cooperation between the United States and Russia.