NASA / SpaceX via Twitter

A video view from the International Space Station shows SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule in the grip of the station's robotic arm, with Earth below.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Astronauts used the International Space Station's robotic arm to grab SpaceX's Dragon capsule on Sunday after the unmanned spacecraft made a dramatic recovery in orbit. The grapple operation reached its successful climax an hour ahead of schedule,proving that the unmanned capsule had fully recovered from a post-launch glitchthat affected its propulsion system.

NASA and California-based SpaceX decided to go ahead with Sunday's rendezvous after the Dragon made a series of orbital maneuvers that demonstrated the craft's thrusters were operating normally. When the Dragon closed in to a distance of 33 feet (10 meters), the Canadian-built robotic arm reached out and latched onto an attachment on the cargo ship.

The robotic-arm grapple was originally scheduled to take place at 6:31 a.m. ET, but it occurred instead at 5:31 a.m., as the station was flying 253 miles (407 kilometers) over Ukraine.

NASA's Mission Control and the space station's astronauts exchanged congratulations. "That was a brilliant capture," NASA astronaut Kate Rubins told space station commander Kevin Ford from Mission Control.

Ford passed along his thanks to NASA's controllers in Houston as well as to SpaceX's mission control at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. "It's not where you start, but where you finish that counts, and you guys really finished this one on the mark,"Ford said. "You're aboard, and we've got lots of science on there to bring aboard and get done. So congratulations to all of you."

As the crew watched, the robotic arm's remote operators in Houston issued commands to pull the Dragon in for a hookup with the station's Harmony module. "The Dragon is ours!" Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield wrote in a Twitter update. "Maneuvering it now on Canadarm2 to docking port, will open hatches. Look forward to new smells."

The capsule was berthed at 8:56 a.m. ET, and within a few hours, the station's astronauts hooked up the electrical connections, opened up the hatch from the Harmony module and took their first look inside the Dragon.

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Space station grabs Dragon cargo craft