A private mission launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Thursday.
Unlike on earlier such flights, none of the passengers are wealthy space tourists paying their own way to orbit. Instead, three of the crew members are sponsored by their nations — Italy, Sweden and Turkey. For Turkey, the crew member is the country’s first astronaut.
The flight, by Axiom Space of Houston, is part of a new era where nations no longer have to build their own rockets and spacecraft to undertake a human spaceflight program. Now they can simply purchase rides from a commercial company, almost like buying a plane ticket.
The astronauts were riding in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After a day’s delay for additional checks of the vehicle, the countdown proceeded smoothly, the rocket’s engines lighting up at 4:49 p.m. Eastern time.
The spacecraft is expected to arrive at the space station early Saturday morning.
The private astronaut mission, Ax-3, is the third for Axiom, which is also developing its own space station and making new spacesuits for NASA. It chartered this rocket flight from SpaceX, and has been sending paying customers for two-week stays at the International Space Station since 2022. In 2019, NASA opened up its part of the space station to visitors, a reversal from earlier policies. (Russia has hosted a series of space tourists on the International Space Station since 2001.)
For the European Space Agency and its 22 nations, commercial flights like Axiom’s offer a way of getting more Europeans to space and highlight the mixing of traditional and commercial space programs.
ESA is currently paying 8.3 percent of the space station’s costs and thus its astronauts receive that fraction of the six-month assignments there. That currently corresponds to just four flights from now until the space station’s scheduled retirement in 2030.
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