Four astronauts, including Turkey's first, arrive at speace station on private mission

A four-man crew including Turkey’s first astronaut arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) early on Saturday for a two-week stay in the latest such mission arranged entirely at commercial expense by Texas-based startup company Axiom Space.

An all-European crew arrived at the ISS on a voyage chartered by Axiom Space. Dubbed Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3), it is the company’s third launch to the space laboratory and the first where all three of the paid seats were bought by national agencies, rather than wealthy individuals.

The rendezvous came about 37 hours after the Axiom quartet’s on Thursday evening liftoff in a rocketship from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Both the Crew Dragon vessel and the Falcon 9 rocket that carried it to orbit were supplied, launched and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX under contract with Axiom, as they were in the first two Axiom missions to the ISS since 2022.

Once the astronauts reach the space station, they fall under the responsibility of Nasa’s mission control operation in Houston.

The Crew Dragon autonomously docked with the ISS at 5:42am as the two space vehicles were flying roughly 400km over the South Pacific, a live Nasa webcast showed. Both were soaring in tandem around the globe at the hypersonic speed of about 28,200km/h as they joined together in orbit.

With coupling achieved, it was expected to take about two hours for the sealed passageway between the space station and crew capsule to be pressurised and checked for leaks before hatches can be opened, allowing the newly arrived astronauts to move aboard the orbiting laboratory.

Plans call for the Axiom-3 crew to spend roughly 14 days in microgravity conducting more than 30 scientific experiments, many of them focused on the effects of spaceflight on human health and disease.

The multinational team was led by Michael López-Alegría, 65, a Spanish-born retired Nasa astronaut and Axiom executive making his sixth flight to the space station. He also commanded Axiom’s debut mission — the first all-private voyage to the ISS — in April 2022.

His second-in-command for Ax-3 is Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei, 49. Rounding out the team are Swedish aviator Marcus Wandt, 43, representing the European Space Agency, and Alper Gezeravcı, 44, a Turkish Air Force veteran and fighter pilot, making his nation’s first human spaceflight.

The Axiom-3 team were welcomed with hugs by the seven members of the station’s current regular crew already abroad the ISS — two Americans from Nasa, one astronaut each from Japan and Denmark and three Russian cosmonauts.

‘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 arrivals will spend about two weeks carrying out 30 experiments, learning more about the impact of microgravity on the human body, advancing industrial processes and more.

Axiom Space was founded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini, a former ISS programme manager for Nasa, and entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian.

In addition to organising private missions to the orbital outpost, the company is developing spacesuits for future Nasa missions to the Moon.

It is also building a commercial space station that it intends to initially attach to the ISS, then separate and orbit independently sometime before the ISS is retired.

Since its founding eight years ago, Houston-based Axiom has carved out a business catering to foreign governments and wealthy private patrons aiming to put their own astronauts into orbit. The company charges at least $55 million per seat for its services organising, training and equipping customers for spaceflight.

Agencies