Florida: Turkey's first astronaut and three other crew members from Sweden, Spain and Italy were launched from Florida on Thursday for a journey to the International Space Station in the latest commercially arranged mission by Texas startup Axiom Space. The astronauts were launched aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the Axiom quartet, atop a Falcon 9 rocket, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
Cameras inside the crew compartment showed footage of the four men strapped into their pressurized cabin, seated calmly in helmeted white-and-black flight suits as the rocket soared toward space, according to Reuters. The rocket's reusable lower stage detached from the rest of the spacecraft and flew back safely to Earth, touching down on a landing zone near the launch site.
The mission is called Axiom-3, organised by Axiom in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and SpaceX. What makes this mission unique is that it is the first time a government or space agency has purchased all the seats and seeks to bolster NASA's plans to increase commercial activity in space, allowing the entry of private companies.
The autonomously operated Crew Dragon was expected to reach the ISS early on Saturday morning and dock with the outpost orbiting some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. The station is currently occupied by seven regular crew members. The mission was the third such flight organized by Houston-based Axiom over the past two years. The company puts astronauts sponsored by foreign governments and private enterprise, charging $55 million for each seat.
Here's a video of the launch
Turkey's debut space venture
The mission holds great significance for Turkey as it is the country's first venture into space. It sent 44-year-old Alper Gezeravci, a Turkish Air Force veteran, on his nation's debut human spaceflight as an Ax-3 mission specialist. He will be joined by Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei (49), Ax-3's designated pilot, Swedish aviator Marcus Wandt (43), another mission specialist; and López-Alegría (65), a retired NASA astronaut and dual citizen of Spain and the United States.
This event is seen as a symbol of a growing and assertive Turkey, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressing great interest in the mission and is considered a stepping stone for Ankara's aerospace ambitions and a new era of international collaboration and innovation in the global space race. Plans for the Axiom-3 mission call for the crew to spend roughly 14 days in microgravity aboard the ISS conducting more than 30 scientific experiments.
Stakes of the mission
Axiom billed the flight as "the first all-European commercial astronaut mission" to the space station. The four astronauts will be welcomed by the station's current regular crew - two Americans from NASA, one astronaut each from Japan and Denmark and three Russian cosmonauts. The Axiom-2 was launched in May 2023 with a guest team of two Americans and two Saudi nationals, including Rayyanah Barnawi, the first Arab woman sent to orbit.
SpaceX, the privately funded rocket and satellite company of billionaire Elon Musk, provides Axiom's launch vehicles and crew capsules under contract, as it has for the National Aeronautics NASA missions to the ISS. SpaceX also runs mission control for its rocket launches from the company's headquarters near Los Angeles.
Axiom, an eight-year-old venture headed by NASA's former ISS program manager, is one of a handful of companies building a commercial space station of its own intended to eventually replace the ISS, which NASA expects to retire around 2030. The ISS was launched in 1998 and has been continuously occupied since 2000 under a US-Russian-led partnership that includes Canada, Japan and 11 countries that belong to the European Space Agency.
(with inputs from Reuters)
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