SpaceX Crew-5 docks at ISS with first Native American commander, Russian cosmonaut

The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance glided toward the International Space Station on Thursday evening, its four occupants strapped inside as the spacecraft descended toward a rendezvous 250 miles above Earth off the west coast of Africa. Just after 5 p.m. Eastern time, the docking mechanism engaged. Inside mission control, the moment registered as confirmation of something larger than a routine crew swap: the persistence of U.S.-Russian cooperation in space, even as the two nations faced mounting tensions over Ukraine.

Nicole Aunapu Mann, 45, commanded the flight—a distinction that carried weight. She became the first Native American woman NASA has sent to orbit, and the first woman to hold the commander's seat aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Mann, a Marine Corps colonel and combat fighter pilot, had been selected for NASA's Artemis program, the agency's push to return humans to the moon. Alongside her were pilot Josh Cassada, 49, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata, 59, a veteran of four previous spaceflights, and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina, 38, who held a distinction of her own: she was the first Russian to fly aboard an American spacecraft in two decades.

The Endurance had launched Wednesday atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, beginning a 29-hour journey to the station. The crew's arrival marked the fifth full NASA expedition team to fly on a SpaceX capsule since the company began ferrying American astronauts to orbit in May 2020. For SpaceX overall, it was the eighth crewed mission launched to date.

Kikina's presence aboard carried diplomatic significance. She was the only female cosmonaut in active service with Russia's space agency, and her flight was enabled by a ride-sharing agreement signed in July between NASA and Roscosmos—an arrangement that allowed the two countries to continue exchanging seats on each other's spacecraft despite the geopolitical fracture widening below. The agreement represented a deliberate choice by both nations to keep a channel of cooperation open in the domain where they had worked together longest and most productively.

After docking, the crew spent nearly two hours on standard procedures: checking for leaks, pressurizing the connecting chamber, verifying systems. Then the hatches opened. Video feeds from the station showed the four floating weightlessly through the padded passageway, their faces visible as they entered the orbital laboratory. They were met with hugs and handshakes by the outgoing crew—three Americans and Samantha Cristoforetti, the Italian station commander—along with two Russians and another NASA astronaut who had arrived via Soyuz the previous month.

During a brief welcoming ceremony, Kikina spoke in Russian, her words translated through mission control. "A lot of people are working hard to make sure our common manned space exploration will continue to exist, to develop further," she said. "We are living proof of this." The statement acknowledged what the docking itself demonstrated: that despite everything fracturing on Earth, the partnership that had kept the ISS continuously inhabited since 2000 remained intact.

The Endurance crew would spend 150 days aboard the station, conducting more than 200 experiments. Many focused on medical research—3-D bio-printing of human tissue, studies of bacteria cultured in microgravity, investigations into how the human body adapts to weightlessness. The ISS, stretching the length of a football field, was operated by a partnership of the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, and eleven European nations. It remained, in the autumn of 2022, one of the few places where that partnership still functioned without reservation.