Astronauts aboard the International Space Station
Four more spaceflyers arrived at the ISS as many as 13 crewmembers
Eight of the 11 astronauts came up on SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules — four apiece on Crew-2 and the Crew-1 mission Related: SpaceX’s Crew-2 astronaut mission for NASA: Live updates
The ISS’s U.S. segment has four astronaut beds, but there are now nine people within this part of the station. So some astronauts will be camping out in temporary arrangements. For example, NASA’s Mike Hopkins and Shane Kimbrough — commanders of Crew-1 and Crew-2, respectively — will sleep in their Crew Dragon capsules.
That leaves three astronauts without a bed, prompting a set of makeshift arrangements dubbed CASA — an acronym for “Crew Alternate Sleep Accommodation” that also happens to mean “house” in Spanish.
International Space Station astronauts preparing makeshift sleeping arrangements on April 7, 2021, to accommodate SpaceX’s Crew-2 mission, which brought four new crewmembers to the orbiting lab on April 24. (Image credit: NASA)
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Soichi Noguchi and fellow Crew-1 astronauts Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, both of NASA, will take the CASA beds. Noguchi will sleep in the astronaut gym, Walker will sleep in the Columbus module and Glover will rest in the airlock, NASA public affairs officer Marie Lewis said during the Crew-2 launch webcast on Friday (April 23).
The current ISS occupants are NASA astronauts Megan McArthur, Mark Vande Hei, Kimbrough, Hopkins, Walker and Glover; JAXA’s Noguchi and Akihiko Hoshide; the European Space Agency’s Thomas Pesquet; and cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov.
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