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SpaceX’s rocket to the International Space Station has successfully completed another spaceflight mission operated entirely by the private sector. On board is a group of European astronauts, including the first person from Turkey to visit outer space.
The mission is the latest in a series of private sector efforts – bolstered by NASA – aimed at fostering business activity in Earth orbit. The United States has for years aimed to increase commercial activity in space as NASA looks to retire the International Space Station and let private space stations take over so the space agency can focus on more ambitious missions. deep into the solar system, like to the moon. and Mars.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took off on Wednesday, but the company was forced to delay the mission as they worked to make final checks before launch. Benji Reed, senior director of Space X’s human spaceflight programs, told reporters during a news briefing Tuesday that crews had to work through the weekend to address issues with a parachute on the Crew Dragon capsule, which sits atop the Falcon 9 during launch.
The rocket finally took off at 4:49 pm ET Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After reaching space, the Crew Dragon capsule broke away from the Falcon 9 rocket and began to navigate on its own, making a slow approach to the space station. The Crew Dragon is expected to dock at the orbiting outpost early Saturday morning.
The four-person crew aboard Axiom-3, as this mission is called, includes Alper Gezeravcı – pronounced “Geh-zeh-rahv-juh” – a fighter pilot with the Turkish air force who is on his way to a historic milestone marked as the first citizen of Turkey to reach low-Earth orbit.
Also on board are Walter Villadei, a member of the Italian air force, and Marcus Wandt, who has been selected as a member of the European Space Agency’s astronaut pool in 2022.
Leading the trip is Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut who is now mission commander for Axiom Space, the Houston-based company that organized this trip with SpaceX and NASA.
Private vs. government astronauts
The Axiom missions are designed to offer flights to the International Space Station to anyone who can afford a ticket. The two previous Axiom missions – flown in 2022 and 2023 – carried a mix of wealthy businessmen and astronauts whose seats were paid for by their governments.
Thursday’s flight will be the first Axiom mission in which all the seats have been purchased by a government or space agency. In addition, each customer has a background as a military pilot, a career many astronauts began.
Wandt’s ticket was arranged by the European Space Agency and the Swedish National Space Agency. The Italian air force paid for Villadei, and the Turkish government covered Gezeravcı’s fee.
“I want to point out how well prepared they are based on their background as military aviators with many years of operational experience,” López-Alegría said during a news conference in December. “Very similar to some of the teams I was able to train with when I was a NASA astronaut.”
The flights operated by Axiom and SpaceX provide an alternative route to space for private citizens and astronauts from nations that are not part of the regular crew rotation aboard the International Space Station, where the crew is rotated about every six months. NASA has a separate agreement — worth about $5 billion — with SpaceX for the flights that support those crew changes, and the space agency chooses to fly the astronauts.
In contrast, Axiom organizes flights to the space station that last only a few weeks. Any private citizen or country can sign up, and seats have been sold for $55 million each. (An Axiom executive declined to comment on pricing for this mission.)
Although ESA has agreements with NASA to fly European astronauts as part of the space station’s normal crew rotation, this mission allowed ESA to get an extra seat and add some of its research to this short flight.
“This is also the first step for the European Space Agency to see how we can move to the post-ISS era,” said Frank De Winne, head of ESA’s European Astronaut Center in Cologne, Germany. “The ISS will end at some point.”
The business model mapped out by Axiom — founded by CEO Michael Suffredini, a former ISS program manager at NASA — is aligned with the US space agency’s current ethos of space exploration, which includes pushing private industry to invest in space travel and ultimately developing commercial space. a station that can replace the aging International Space Station. The latter has already been operating for over twenty years and could be decommissioned as early as 2030.
Axiom is one of many companies with plans to eventually build its own private space station.
Research in space
The Axiom-3 crew is expected to spend 14 days on the space station, working alongside the seven astronauts already aboard the orbiting laboratory.
The group will have a “full research docket, more than 30 experiments,” Axiom President Matt Ondler said during a December briefing about the mission. “The team will be working continuously on experiments and research programs. In fact, we had more research than we could fit into the mission, which is a great example of the demand there.”
The science includes work that will research how astronauts could predict if they are at risk of motion sickness in space, studying lightning on top of the clouds, tests on proteins linked to neurogenetic diseases such as Alzheimer’s , and an experiment that will investigate how gene-gene is made. plants in response to microgravity.
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