2024-01-20 16:10:03
A four-person European crew has reached the International Space Station (ISS), including a Turkish astronaut for the first time. Their space capsule docked with the ISS on Saturday. In addition to the Turkish Air Force pilot Alper Gezeravci, the Swedish astronaut Marcus Wandt, the Italian Walter Villadei and the US Spaniard Michael López-Alegría are also part of the Ax-3 mission, which is organized by the private US space company Axiom Space with the US space agency NASA .
The crew was greeted by the seven-member crew of the ISS. This consists of two US astronauts, a Danish and a Japanese astronaut and three Russian cosmonauts. “It’s nice to see five Europeans in space on the ISS,” said German ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer on the online service X, formerly Twitter.
The Dragon capsule attached to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was launched on Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida. The newcomers will spend around two weeks on the ISS and carry out a series of experiments. The aim is, among other things, to better understand the effects of microgravity on the human body.
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