Cape Canaveral (Florida): The crew of the International Space Station on Sunday celebrated the docking of SpaceX's sleek, new crew capsule at the space base, calling it the "first day of a new era for the next generation of space explorers".
The beefed-up, redesigned Dragon is the first US-made, designed-for-crew spacecraft to pull up to the station in eight years.
The bullet-shaped capsule, developed by Elon Musk's SpaceX company under contract to NASA, flew autonomously and linked up on its own, without the help of the robotic arm normally used to guide spacecraft into position.
Ever since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, the US has been hitching rides to and from the space station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
In the meantime, NASA has been paying two companies - SpaceX and Boeing - to build and operate its next generation of rocket ships.
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SpaceX's 27-foot-long (8-meter-long) capsule rocketed into orbit early Saturday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center with an instrumented mannequin strapped into one of its four seats in a white-and-black, form-fitting SpaceX spacesuit.
The test dummy was nicknamed Ripley after the main character in the "Alien" movies.
Ripley and the capsule are rigged with sensors to measure noise, vibration and stresses and monitor the life-support, propulsion and other critical systems.
SpaceX already has made 16 trips to the space station using cargo Dragons, but the version designed for humans is slightly bigger and safer.
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If the six-day test flight goes well, a capsule could take two NASA astronauts to the orbiting outpost this summer.
Next up, though, is Boeing, which is looking to launch its Starliner capsule without a crew as early as April and with a crew possibly in August.
