Thomas Pesquet's relief has arrived on the ISS.

A SpaceX capsule with four astronauts, three Americans and a German on board, docked Thursday evening at the international space station.

The Crew-3 crew replaces Crew-2 who left the station on Monday and which included the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and Tom Marshburn, as well as European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Matthias Maurer were launched from Florida by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Wednesday evening a takeoff several times postponed, especially because of the weather.

First time in space for three of the astronauts

For the American Tom Marshburn, this is the third sojourn in space.

He already flew aboard a space shuttle in 2009, then a Soyuz rocket in 2012-2013.

The other three astronauts, including the head of the mission Raja Chari, on the other hand made the trip for the first time.

Matthias Maurer is the twelfth German to end up in orbit.

They were greeted by American Mark Vande Hei, who celebrated his birthday on Wednesday, alone in the US segment of the station.

Two Russian cosmonauts are also on board.

The mission is called Crew-3 because it is the third operational to the ISS provided by SpaceX on behalf of NASA.

But this is actually the fifth time that Elon Musk's company has launched humans into orbit: before Crew-1 and Crew-2, a test mission (Demo-2) had sent two astronauts to the ISS. .

And in September, SpaceX also launched four tourists for three days in space, independent of NASA.

What are the astronauts going to do for six months?

The mission will include many experiences.

One is to grow plants in space without soil or other growing medium, and another is to build microgravity optical fibers that could be of higher quality than those made on earth.

Crew-3 astronauts will also carry out spacewalks, in particular to continue installing new solar panels on the ISS.

Finally, they will host two tourist missions: Japanese people brought by a Russian Soyuz spacecraft at the end of the year, then in February 2022 passengers from the Ax-1 mission, organized by the company Axiom Space in partnership with SpaceX.

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