Arriving early on Saturday, a four-person crew, which included Turkey’s first astronaut, will spend two weeks at the International Space Station (ISS). This mission is the most recent to be planned entirely at commercial expense by Texas-based startup business Axiom Space.
The Axiom quartet took off in a rocketship on Thursday night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and met up around 37 hours later.
Since they participated in the first two Axiom flights to the ISS since 2022, Elon Musk’s SpaceX provided, launched, and operated both the Crew Dragon vessel and the Falcon 9 rocket that lifted it into orbit under a contract with Axiom.
NASA’s mission control operation in Houston is in charge of the astronauts once they arrive at the space station.
A live NASA webcast demonstrated how the Crew Dragon autonomously connected with the ISS at 5:42 a.m. EDT (1042 GMT) while the two spacecraft were travelling about 250 miles (400 km) above the South Pacific.
Together, they were travelling at a hypersonic speed of roughly 17,500 miles per hour (28,200 km/h) around the earth in tandem.
After connection was accomplished, it was anticipated that it would take roughly two hours to pressurise and inspect the sealed hatchway connecting the crew capsule to the space station so that the recently arrived astronauts could board the orbiting laboratory.
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