2024-01-20 14:59:00
The Dragon capsule joined the International Space Station (ISS) this Saturday following a 36-hour journey, according to the Axiom Space website. The operation, named Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3), is the third of its kind organized by the American company Axiom Space and the first whose headquarters were all financed by national agencies and not by wealthy individuals.
Attached to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the Dragon capsule took off Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to join the ISS, in orbit 420 kilometers above the Earth.
First Turk in space
Passengers include Alper Gezeravci, a pilot and colonel in the Turkish Air Force, the first Turk to go into space. The mission also includes Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei, who previously flew aboard a Virgin Galactic spacecraft, and Swede Marcus Wandt, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA).
The Spanish-American Michael Lopez-Alegria, former NASA astronaut, is the mission commander, employed by Axiom Space to support the three clients.
The crew was greeted by the seven people already on board the flying laboratory: two American astronauts, a Dane, a Japanese and three Russian cosmonauts.
Impact of microgravity
Members of the private mission will spend two weeks aboard the space station. They must carry out a series of experiments, in particular to better understand the impact of microgravity on the human body.
Axiom Space was founded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini, a former manager of NASA’s ISS program, and entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian. In addition to organizing private missions to the space station, the company is developing suits for future NASA lunar missions.
Axiom Space also plans to build the first commercial space station, which will initially be attached to the ISS.
The exact costs of Ax-3 have not been made public, but in 2018 when the company announced its program, including leasing SpaceX equipment and a fee from NASA for use of the station, it set a cost of $55 million per seat.
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