(Reuters) – On Saturday, a four-member crew, including Turkey’s first astronaut, arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) for a two-week stay. This mission was arranged entirely at commercial expense by Texas-based startup company Axiom Space.
The crew launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida and reached the ISS about 37 hours later. Both the Crew Dragon vessel and the Falcon 9 rocket were supplied, launched and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX under contract with Axiom.
After reaching the space station, the astronauts fell under the responsibility of NASA’s mission control operation in Houston.
The Crew Dragon autonomously docked with the ISS at 5:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT) as the two space vehicles were flying roughly 250 miles (400 km) over the South Pacific, as shown in a live NASA webcast.
Both were soaring around the globe at the hypersonic speed of about 17,500 miles per hour (28,200 km/h) as they joined together in orbit.
After the coupling was achieved, it was expected to take about two hours for the passageway to be pressurized and checked for leaks before hatches can be opened, allowing the newly arrived astronauts to move aboard the orbiting laboratory.
The Axiom-3 crew is set to spend roughly 14 days in microgravity conducting more than 30 scientific experiments, with a focus on the effects of spaceflight on human health and disease. The multinational team was led by Michael López-AlegrÃa, 65, a Spanish-born retired NASA astronaut and Axiom executive, who commanded Axiom’s debut mission in April 2022.
His second-in-command for Ax-3 is Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei, 49. Rounding out the team are Swedish aviator Marcus Wandt, 43, and Alper Gezeravcı, 44, a Turkish Air Force veteran and fighter pilot, making his nation’s first human spaceflight.
They will be welcomed aboard ISS by the seven members of the station’s current regular crew – two Americans from NASA, one astronaut each from Japan and Denmark and three Russian cosmonauts.
Since its founding eight years ago, Houston-based Axiom has carved out a business catering to foreign governments and wealthy private patrons aiming to put their own astronauts into orbit. The company charges at least $55 million per seat for its services organizing, training and equipping customers for spaceflight.
Axiom also is one of a handful of companies building a commercial space station of its own intended to eventually replace the ISS, which NASA expects to retire around 2030.
Launched to orbit in 1998, the ISS has been continuously occupied since 2000 under a U.S.-Russian-led partnership that includes Canada, Japan and 11 countries belonging to the European Space Agency.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; editing by David Evans)
