Space station’s first all-private astronaut team welcomed aboard orbiting platform

By Steve Gorman

(Reuters) -The primary all-private group of astronauts ever launched to the Worldwide House Station (ISS) had been welcomed aboard the orbiting analysis platform on Saturday to start a weeklong science mission hailed as a milestone in business spaceflight.

Their arrival took place 21 hours after the four-man group representing Houston-based startup firm Axiom House Inc lifted off on Friday from NASA’s Kennedy House Heart, driving atop a SpaceX-launched Falcon 9 rocket.

The Crew Dragon capsule lofted into orbit by the rocket docked with the ISS at about 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT) on Saturday as the 2 area automobiles had been flying roughly 250 miles (420 km) above the central Atlantic Ocean, a stay webcast of the coupling from the Nationwide Aeronautics and House Administration confirmed.

The ultimate strategy was delayed for about 45 minutes by a technical glitch with a video feed used to observe the capsule’s rendezvous with the ISS, but it surely in any other case proceeded easily.

The multinational Axiom group, planning to spend eight days in orbit, was led by retired Spanish-born NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, 63, the corporate’s vp for enterprise improvement.

His second-in-command was Larry Connor, an actual property and know-how entrepreneur and aerobatics aviator from Ohio designated because the mission pilot. Connor is in his 70s, however the firm didn’t present his exact age.

Rounding out the Ax-1 crew had been investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, 52, each serving as mission specialists.

With docking achieved, it took almost two hours for the sealed passageway between the area station and crew capsule to be pressurized and checked for leaks earlier than hatches had been opened to permit the newly arrived astronauts to come back aboard the ISS.

The Ax-1 group was welcomed by all seven of the common, government-paid crew members already occupying the area station: three American astronauts, a German astronaut from the European House Company and three Russian cosmonauts.

The NASA webcast confirmed the 4 smiling Axiom astronauts, wearing navy blue flight fits, floating headfirst, one after the other, by the portal into the area station, warmly greeted with hugs and handshakes by the ISS crew.

Lopez-Alegria later pinned astronaut wings onto the uniforms of the three spaceflight rookies of his Axiom group — Connor, Stibbe and Pathy — throughout a quick welcome ceremony.

Stibbe is now the second Israeli to fly to area, after Ilan Ramon, who perished with six NASA crewmates within the 2003 area shuttle Columbia catastrophe.

SCIENCE FOCUSED

The brand new arrivals introduced with them two dozen science and biomedical experiments to conduct aboard ISS, together with analysis on mind well being, cardiac stem cells, most cancers and growing old, in addition to a know-how demonstration to provide optics utilizing the floor rigidity of fluids in microgravity.

The mission, a collaboration amongst Axiom, Elon Musk’s rocket firm SpaceX and NASA, has been touted by all three as a significant step within the growth of space-based business actions collectively referred to by insiders because the low-Earth orbit economic system, or “LEO economic system” for brief.

NASA officers say the pattern will assist the U.S. area company focus extra of its assets on big-science exploration, together with its Artemis program to ship people again to the moon and finally to Mars.

Whereas the area station has hosted civilian guests on occasion, the Ax-1 mission marks the primary all-commercial group of astronauts despatched to ISS for its meant function as an orbiting analysis laboratory.

The Axiom mission additionally stands as SpaceX’s sixth human spaceflight in almost two years, following 4 NASA astronaut missions to the area station and the Inspiration 4 launch in September that despatched an all-civilian crew into orbit for the primary time. That flight didn’t dock with the ISS.

Axiom executives say their astronaut ventures and plans to construct a personal area station in Earth orbit go far past the astro-tourism providers provided to rich thrill-seekers by such corporations as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, owned respectively by billionaire entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Enhancing by Angus MacSwan, Daniel Wallis and Jonathan Oatis)