'SpaceX, this is Resilience': Four astronauts begin six-month stay on space station

The crew members of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, spacecraft commander Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, depart for the launchpad for the first operational NASA commercial crew mission at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. November 15, 2020. [Joe Skipper, Reuters]

Four astronauts riding a newly-designed spacecraft from Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX greeted their new crewmates aboard the International Space Station on Tuesday after successfully docking in a landmark achievement for private space travel.

In NASA’s first full-fledged mission ferrying a crew into orbit on a privately-owned spacecraft, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Resilience opened its hatch door shortly after 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT), two hours after docking and 27 hours after launching atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla.