Four crew join ISS after 24-hour journey on board SpaceX's Dragon Endeavour spacecraft

Four new crew members have arrived at the International Space Station (ISS), one day after launching from Earth – but only after some slight technical trouble, a media report said.

SpaceX's Dragon crew capsule, dubbed Endeavour, docked with the ISS at 01:40 EST (06:40 GMT) on Friday following a 24-hour voyage. 

The new inhabitants are two Americans, one Russian and Sultan al-Neyadi, a University of Brighton graduate and only the second Emirati to voyage to space. 

The new crew members had to wait an extra hour before boarding while mission control had to troubleshoot a faulty docking hook sensor on the capsule. 

It follows the launch being postponed by three days earlier in the week because of a clog in a filter that supplies ignition fluid to start the rocket engines.

The mission to the ISS is called Crew-6, as it marks the sixth crewed operational flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft under NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP). 

'After a brief scenic detour, welcome to the International Space Station,' SpaceX Mission Control radioed.

'We're happy to be here,' responded Crew-6 commander Stephen Bowen, a retired Navy submariner. 

The SpaceX capsule and its four astronauts had to wait 65 feet (20 metres) from the ISS as flight controllers in California scrambled to come up with a software fix for the unanticipated issue.

NASA said in a statement: 'Docking was delayed slightly as mission teams completed troubleshooting of a faulty docking hook sensor on Dragon. 

'The NASA and SpaceX teams verified that all of the docking hooks were in the proper configuration, and SpaceX developed a software override for the faulty sensor that allowed the docking process to successfully continue.'  

SpaceX mission control urged patience, telling the astronauts they could stay in this holding pattern for up to two hours.

Once new software commands were relayed, the astronauts received the go-ahead to proceed. 

In the end, the link-up occurred an hour late as the capsule and space station soared 260 miles (420 km) above the coast of Somalia.