The rare “orbital traffic jam” occurred after Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft was repositioned to the station’s Unity module, filling the final open port.\n<\/p>\n
![\"Northrop](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/54958470463_9f1071896e_c.jpg\")
Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL cargo craft is pictured in the grips of the International Space Station Canadarm2 robotic arm. Cygnus XL had been temporarily released from its Earth-facing port on the Unity module to make room for the Soyuz MS-28 crew spacecraft. The orbital outpost was soaring 263 miles above the Pacific Ocean southwest of Galapagos Islands at the time of this photograph. Image courtesy of NASA<\/p>\n
NASA said the eight visiting spacecraft currently at the ISS include vehicles from the United States, Russia and Japan. They consist of multiple SpaceX<\/a> Dragon spacecraft, the Cygnus XL cargo craft, JAXA’s new HTV-X1 cargo vehicle, two Russian Soyuz crew spacecraft and two Progress cargo ships.<\/p>\n The map below shows the unusually busy ISS configuration with each port in use.\n<\/p>\n It has been an active week for supply deliveries and crew movements. On Thanksgiving, NASA astronaut Chris Williams<\/a> and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev arrived aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Cygnus spacecraft was temporarily moved to make room for their docking.<\/p>\n On Monday morning, Cygnus was reattached to the ISS, and NASA astronauts Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Williams began unpacking science experiments and supplies that arrived on Sept. 18.<\/p>\n Next week, Kim will depart the station with Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky aboard the Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft to return to Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia’s ISS Progress 77 cargo spacecraft docks to the Pirs docking compartment on the International Space Station’s Russian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165174,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[108014,111,139,69,147,1503],"class_list":{"0":"post-165173","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-chris-williams","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-spacex"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/ISSdocking.png\")
The International Space Station Configuration on Dec. 1, 2025 with eight spaceships parked at the space station. Image courtesy of NASA<\/p>\n