Four crew members will be launched on Wednesday on a private mission to the International Space Station.
The flight, organized by the Axiom Space company, based in Houston, is scheduled to take off at 8 am et of the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The quartet will travel to the orbit in a dragon dragon capsule of the Spacex crew on a Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA will transmit the live coverage of the launch from 7:05 am et in NASA+.
The flight was scheduled to launch on Tuesday, but the strong winds along the coast of Florida forced a one -day delay. The mission, known as AX-4, is expected to last approximately two weeks at the International Space Station.
The mission will be directed by the NASA withdrawal of NASA Peggy Whitson, who has already registered a 675 -day record in space, more than any other American astronaut. The pilot Shubhanshu Shukla, an astronaut of the Indian Space Research Organization; Mission Specialist Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, a Polish scientist from the European Space Agency; and the specialist in Mission Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer from Hungary.
Shukla, Uznoński-Wiśniewski and Kapu will make history by becoming the first people of their countries to live and work at the International Space Station.
During their two-week stay in the orbiting laboratory, the members of the AX-4 crew will carry out a series of scientific experiments, according to NASA, including muscle regeneration studies, how sprouts and edible microalgae grow in microgravity and how small aquatic organisms survive in ISS.
If the launch goes according to the plan, the four astronauts docked at the space station on Thursday around 12:30 pm et.
The next flight will be the fourth mission of the Axiom Space crew to the International Space Station. The company’s first private expedition was in 2022 with a totally civilian crew.
The AX-4 mission price has not been publicly revealed, but the space tourists allegedly paid around $ 55 million per seat in previous axiom expeditions.
