Sharjah24 - AFP: The SpaceX crew that will ferry back two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station docked with the orbiting laboratory Sunday, a live stream of the mission showed.
The Falcon 9 rocket took off at 1:17 pm (1717 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday, with the Crew-9 mission on a Dragon spacecraft making contact with the ISS at 5:30 pm Sunday.
After docking was completed, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov boarded the station just after 7:00 pm, embracing their floating colleagues on the space station.
"What a fabulous day it was today," NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy said at a news conference.
When Hague and Gorbunov return from the space station in February, they will bring back two space veterans -- Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams -- whose stay on the ISS was prolonged for months due to problems with their Boeing-designed Starliner spacecraft.
The newly developed Starliner was making its first crewed flight when it delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS in June.
They were supposed to be there for only an eight-day stay, but after problems with the Starliner's propulsion system emerged during the flight there, NASA was forced to weigh a radical change in plans.
After weeks of intensive tests on the Starliner's reliability, the space agency finally decided to return it to Earth without its crew, and to bring the two stranded astronauts back home on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission.
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