The four astronauts who arrived this Saturday at the International Space Station (ISS) on a historic mission, being the first completely private to reach that destinationwere greeted by Expedition 67 astronauts to the ISS with hugs and a photo session.
NASA astronauts Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron were in charge of opening the interior hatch following confirming that the pressurization had been done correctly.
Almost two hours following the Dragon Endeavour, with four astronauts from the Axiom company — the Hispanic-American Michael López-Alegría, the American Larry Connor, the Canadian Mark Pathy and the Israeli Eytan Stibbe — arrived following 12:40 GMT . and hooked on the ISS, the hosts welcomed her.
Once aboard the station, the Axiom crew was greeted by members of Expedition 67, which in addition to Marshburn and Barron is home to Raja Chari, also from NASA; astronaut Matthias Maurer, from the European Space Agency (ESA), and cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Sergey Korsokov and Denis Matveev, from the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
After greeting each other with hugs and handshakes, the newcomers posed in front of Barron’s camera, who was in charge of preparing the lights and the welcome “set” at all times.
Station Commander Tom Marshburn was tasked with pressurizing the space between the hatches of the Dragon ship and the station and, along with Barron, conducted a leak check before opening the hatches to welcome the crew from private astronauts.
“Team #Ax1 greeted by Space Station crew leaving Dragon and entering home for the next 8 days,” Axiom Space company immediately tweeted.
Once the greetings had been made and the space within the ISS “organized”, the 11 astronauts gathered in front of a camera to carry out the welcome ceremony, a kind of “selfie” in a circle for which it was necessary for two of them to stand upside down taking advantage of the weightlessness.
At the ceremony, the commander of the AX-1, former NASA astronaut of Spanish origin Miguel López-Alegría, decorated his three companions with a pin from the Association of Space Explorers (ASE).
The ASE is a non-profit organization made up of people who have completed at least one Earth orbit in space, as defined by the International Air Federation.
The Axiom 1 Mission (Ax-1) took off this Friday from Cape Canaveral, Florida (USA) with, in addition to López-Alegría, three other civilians on board bound for the ISS, where they will carry out scientific and commercial activities.
After a nearly 21-hour journey, NASA said on its mission blog today, the capsule docked autonomously with the space-oriented port of the ISS Harmony module.
Except for problems with the video camera that prevented spectators on the ground from seeing the final leg of the trip from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and a one-hour delay in arrival, everything went as planned.
The ships used by Ax-1 — a Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon Endeavor capsule — belong to SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, but the Texas company Axiom is responsible for the expedition.