A few hours ago, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft docked with the Harmony module of the International Space Station, completing the first part of its Crew-12 or SpaceX Crew-12 mission that began with its launch about 34 hours earlier. After checking that the pressure gets properly balanced, the hatch will be opened to allow Andrey Fedyaev, Jack Hathaway, Jessica Meir, and Sophie Adenot to enter the Station and start their mission.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft is equipped with an automated docking system to the International Docking Adapter (IDA). The approach procedure, with safety as the top priority, has been extensively tested during previous missions of the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
The Crew-12 mission crew joins Expedition 74. Normally, the crew of a SpaceX mission meets the previous one, but this wasn’t the case because the Crew-11 mission ended a few weeks early due to a medical emergency, which was kept strictly confidential. There was an attempt to advance the launch of the Crew-12 mission by at least a few days, but bad weather almost completely thwarted it. Now, at last, the International Space Station crew is complete again, and full scientific research can resume.
The Crew-12 mission crew was also at the center of a possible espionage case. Despite international tensions, Russia continues to collaborate with other nations in managing the International Space Station, but the incident that led to a crew change brings to mind stories from the Cold War era.
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev was supposed to be part of the Crew-12 mission but was replaced by Andrey Fedyaev in December 2025. According to an unofficial version, Artemyev was caught photographing SpaceX technology and documents. The Russian space agency Roscosmos mentioned the replacement merely as Artemyev’s transition to other work, and this non-explanation sounds very bad.
In space, there are no national borders, but on Earth, local interests, which we might call tribal, continue to exist and only cause global problems. Looking upwards isn’t just a physical exercise, but, above all, a way to change your mental perspective!
