On Saturday, an all-European crew, including Turkey’s first astronaut, arrived to the International Space Station on an Axiom Space trip.
Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) is the company’s third launch to the space lab, and the first in which all three paid seats were purchased by national agencies rather than wealthy individuals.
The spacecraft docked with the ISS around 1043 GMT and boarded within approximately two hours, according to NASA’s broadcast of the event.
On Thursday, the SpaceX Crew Dragon was launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
It landed at the ISS, which is approximately 260 miles (420 kilometers) above the Earth, after a 36-hour mission, according to Axiom Space’s website.
Alper Gezeravci, a Turkish pilot and air force colonel, is joined by Walter Villadei, an Italian air force colonel who has already gone to the edge of space in a Virgin Galactic space aircraft, and Marcus Wandt from Sweden, who represents the European Space Agency.
They are led by Axiom’s Chief Astronaut, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a Spanish and American citizen and former NASA astronaut.
The seven crew members already aboard the ISS greeted the Axiom-3 team with embraces, representing Japan, Denmark, the United States, and Russia.
‘Pretty exciting’
“We have doubled the number of nationalities on board the space station, going from four to eight, which I think is a great testament to the international collaboration which underpins this marvelous space station,” said ISS commander Andreas Mogensen in a livestream, welcoming the four-member Axiom crew.
“The ride uphill was pretty exciting. It never gets old,” added Axiom commander Lopez-Alegria.
“I think we probably spent a few more hours in Dragon than we felt like we needed to,” he said, smiling. “But it was all good.”
The new visitors will conduct 30 experiments over two weeks to explore the effects of microgravity on the human body and advance industrial operations.
Michael Suffredini, a former NASA ISS program manager, and entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian co-founded Axiom Space in 2016.
In addition to organizing private expeditions to the orbital outpost, the business is designing spacesuits for future NASA missions to the Moon.
It is also developing a commercial space station, which will initially attach to the ISS before separating and orbiting independently before the ISS is removed.
The actual cost of the Ax-3 has not been released, but when the business first launched the initiative in 2018, it set a price tag of $55 million per seat, which includes chartering SpaceX hardware and paying NASA for services.
Spacenews.com recently revealed that Hungary is planning a $100 million deal with Axiom for a future trip with one astronaut.
Britain, which is working to develop a post-Brexit space strategy, has also signed an agreement for a future mission including UK astronauts.