Four industrial house fliers who introduced from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Axiom’s 2d personal astronaut venture Sunday will arrive on the International Space Station on a SpaceX group pill Monday to start out an eight-day keep stuffed with medical experiments, scholar outreach occasions, and sightseeing.
Docking of SpaceX’s Dragon Freedom spacecraft on the house station’s Harmony module is scheduled for 9:10 am EDT (1310 UTC), finishing an automatic rendezvous that noticed the pill fit orbits with the advanced with a series of thruster firings after launching Sunday from Florida’s Space Coast.
The venture is controlled by way of Houston-based Axiom Space, an organization with plans to fly a sequence of absolutely industrial astronaut missions to the International Space Station sooner than launching their very own personal standalone analysis advanced in low Earth orbit.
This flight is commanded by way of Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who has spent extra time in house than every other American. Whitson is now an worker of Axiom, and is joined by way of pilot John Shoffner, an investor and novice race automobile driving force who paid for his seat to the gap station. Two Saudi Arabian astronauts — Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi — had their journeys subsidized by way of the Saudi govt.
After docking on the station, Whitson and her crewmates will open hatches and go with the flow throughout the outpost to sign up for the lab’s seven-person long-duration group, consisting of 3 Americans, 3 Russians, and one astronaut from the United Arab Emirates.
The Ax-2 group will stay on the station for 8 days, with undocking scheduled May 30 to start out a flight again to Earth, concentrated on splashdown off the coast of Florida.
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