The Axiom-3 mission, the first commercial all-European mission to the International Space Station (ISS), has arrived safely at its destination. Following launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, January 18, using a Falcon 9 rocket, a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft arrived at the space station at 7:13 a.m. ET today, Saturday, January 20.
On board the Dragon were four private astronauts: Commander Michael López-Alegría of the U.S. and Spain, Pilot Walter Villadei of the Italian Air Force, and Mission Specialists Alper Gezeravcı of Türkiye and Marcus Wandt of Sweden and the European Space Agency. The four crew members have now entered the space station, greeted by current ISS Expedition 70 crew members.
The start of the mission on Thursday marked the first time a commercial crew of all European astronauts had launched to the ISS. The European Space Agency (ESA) sent one of its astronauts on a commercial flight for the first time under an agreement with flight provider Axiom Space.
The crew of four will spend two weeks on the space station, performing microgravity experiments and working alongside current ISS crew members from NASA, ESA, Russian space agency Roscosmos, and Japanese space agency JAXA. There are currently seven members of Expedition 70, bringing the total number of people on board the station to 11.
According to Axiom Space, the Axiom-3 crew will perform more than 30 different experiments during their time in orbit, with data collected from the crew members also being used to study the effects of spaceflight on human physiology. The research includes experiments from Italy, Turkey, Sweden, and the European Space Agency.
The Axiom-3 astronauts are scheduled to depart from the space station on February 3, traveling back to Earth in the same Dragon spacecraft that brought them there. The Dragon is slated to splash down off the coast of Florida.
Also next month, four of the current Expedition 70 crew are scheduled to return to Earth as well. Astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli, Andreas Mogensen, Satoshi Furukawa, and Konstantin Borisov of Crew-7 are set to depart from the space station on 13 February. Their replacements, four astronauts of Crew-8, will launch for the space station later in February.
