WASHINGTON, May 25: Astronauts aboard the International Space Station captured Space Exploration Technologies’ Dragon cargo ship and guided it into a berth on Friday, docking the first privately owned vehicle to reach the orbital outpost.

Using the station’s 58-foot-long robotic crane, Nasa astronaut Don Pettit snared Dragon at 9:56am EDT (1356 GMT) as the two spacecraft zoomed 400km over northwest Australia at 28,164km per hour.

“It looks like we’ve got us a dragon by the tail,” Mr Pettit radioed to Nasa Mission Control in Houston. Mr Pettit was operating the Canadian-built robotic arm from the space station as it reached out and hooked on to the unmanned SpaceX capsule.     The capsule, built and operated by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is the first of two new commercial freighters Nasa will use to fly cargo to the $100 billion outpost following the retirement of the space shuttles last year.

The United States plans to buy commercial flight services for its astronauts as well, breaking Russia’s monopoly on flying crews to the station.

Dragon blasted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday. The space station crew anchored it into the station’s Harmony connecting node around noon on Friday.

After a successful pass by the station on Thursday to test its navigation and communications systems, Dragon proceeded at a snail’s pace on Friday, stopping, starting and occasionally retreating to make sure it could be controlled.

At one point, the SpaceX ground operations team in Hawthorne, California, halted Dragon to adjust the capsule’s laser imaging system, which it uses to see the station. Sensors were picking up stray reflections from the station’s Japanese module, said Nasa mission commentator Josh Byerly.

Dragon ended up using just one of its two laser imaging systems for the final approach to the station, a bit dicey because a failure would have triggered an automatic abort.

But one eye was all Dragon needed to position itself 30 feet beneath the station and within arm’s reach of the robotic crane that would haul it up for berthing.—Agencies