SpaceX Crew-5 docks at ISS with first Native American woman commander

The Crew Dragon capsule Endurance pulled alongside the International Space Station just after 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, October 6, 2022, completing a 29-hour journey from Earth. Inside were four people: two American astronauts, a Japanese veteran of four previous spaceflights, and a Russian cosmonaut—the first to fly aboard an American spacecraft in two decades. The docking itself was routine, the kind of technical precision that has become almost ordinary in the decade since SpaceX began ferrying crews to orbit. But the crew composition carried weight that went beyond the mechanics of rendezvous.

Nicole Aunapu Mann, 45, held the commander's seat. She is a U.S. Marine Corps colonel and combat fighter pilot, and she is the first Native American woman NASA has ever sent to space. She is also the first woman to command a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Her presence in that role represented a threshold crossed—not symbolically alone, but in the actual structure of who gets to lead missions to the orbital laboratory. Beside her sat Josh Cassada, 49, the pilot. Koichi Wakata, 59, a Japanese astronaut making his fifth spaceflight, occupied another seat. The fourth crew member was Anna Kikina, 38, a cosmonaut and the only active female cosmonaut in Russia's space program.

Kikina's presence carried its own significance. She was the first Russian to fly aboard an American spacecraft since 2002, a gap that reflected decades of Cold War separation and, more recently, the fracturing of relations between Moscow and Washington. Yet here she was, strapped into a Falcon 9 rocket that lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, bound for a shared orbital laboratory. The flight happened under a new ride-sharing agreement signed in July between NASA and Roscosmos, a formal acknowledgment that despite the war in Ukraine and the escalating tensions it had created, the two space agencies would continue to fly on each other's vehicles. Space, it seemed, remained a place where cooperation could persist.

The Endurance had launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the fifth full crew that the private company founded by Elon Musk had sent to the ISS since beginning human spaceflight operations in May 2020. The docking occurred roughly 250 miles above Earth, off the west coast of Africa, as the station and capsule circled the planet together. Once the vehicles were linked, the crew began the standard procedures: leak checks, pressurization of the passageway between capsule and station, preparation to open the hatch and enter the orbital laboratory.

Waiting for them were seven people already aboard—the Crew-4 team of three Americans and an Italian astronaut, along with two Russians and a NASA astronaut who had arrived on a Soyuz spacecraft the previous month. The Crew-4 members were scheduled to return to Earth sometime the following week, their five-month tenure complete. Mann and her team would take their place for the next 150 days, conducting more than 200 experiments. The work ranged across medical research: three-dimensional bio-printing of human tissue, studies of bacteria cultured in the weightlessness of orbit, investigations into how the human body adapts to prolonged spaceflight. The ISS, a structure spanning the length of a football field, has been continuously inhabited since 2000, operated by a partnership of the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, and eleven European nations. It remains one of the few places on Earth where such cooperation is not merely possible but essential.

Mann's voice came through the radio moments after the docking was complete. "We look forward to getting to work," she said, speaking to mission control and the crew already aboard. Wakata radioed his thanks for the smooth ride. The mission had begun.