WASHINGTON — Axiom Space’s second private astronaut mission is on its option to the International Space Station after a launch May 21.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 5:37 p.m. Eastern. The Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying the four-person Ax-2 crew separated from the rocket’s upper stage 12 minutes after liftoff.
The Dragon spacecraft, named Freedom, is scheduled to dock with the station at about 9:30 a.m. Eastern May 22. The spacecraft will remain there for eight days before returning with its four-person crew.
Ax-2 is commanded by Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who holds the U.S. record for longest cumulative time in space at 665 days. She is currently director of human space flight at Axiom.
John Shoffner, a non-public astronaut who trained as a backup for Axiom’s Ax-1 mission in 2022, serves as pilot for Ax-2. The 2 mission specialists on board are Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi, two Saudi astronauts chosen by the Saudi Space Commission in February to fly on the mission under an agreement signed with Axiom Space in September 2022. Alqarni and Barnawi are the second and third Saudi residents to go to space, after Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, who flew as a payload specialist on an area shuttle mission in 1985. Barnawi is the primary female Saudi astronaut.
The Ax-2 mission was scheduled to spend 10 days on the ISS, but delays within the launch brought on by a postponed Falcon Heavy launch led Axiom Space and NASA to comply with shorten the mission by two days to suit it right into a crowded manifest of missions going to the station.
Derek Hassmann, chief of mission integration and operations at Axiom Space, said at a May 15 briefing that the corporate prioritized research activities planned for the mission but dropped some lower priority outreach and other activities. Nonetheless, the Saudi astronauts still plan to perform a “whole series of media events” during their time on the station, he said, including a series of sessions with students.
Even before the mission was shortened, the crew had a crowded schedule. The astronauts will perform greater than 20 experiments in topics starting from life sciences to in-space manufacturing. Axiom has its own technology demonstrations as well to support its plans to develop industrial modules it is going to add to the ISS as a precursor for a standalone space station.
“We’ve got a fully jam-packed mission,” Lucie Low, chief scientist at Axiom, said during a briefing concerning the science planned for the mission in April. The corporate aggregated the experiments from the Saudi Space Commission and other partners, then worked to suit those projects into available crew time and ISS resources. “We mainly play an enormous game of very complicated four-dimensional Jenga.”
The corporate did incorporate lessons from Ax-1, where the four-person crew was overloaded with tasks. The Ax-2 crew adjusted the training for the mission, increasing work in some areas and decreasing it in others.
“We want to return to more of a short-duration training style, more like how we trained for shuttle flights,” Whitson said at a May 16 briefing, “specializing in the areas where we’d like probably the most experience with.”
She noted her schedule is “quite a bit less constrained” than Michael López-Alegría, who commanded Ax-1 last yr. “I’ll be available to assist the crewmembers quite a bit more as they need assistance, which can primarily just be the primary day or two,” she said. “Once they get their space legs under them, I do know these guys are going to be extremely competent.”
Ax-2 is the tenth crewed flight by SpaceX in a little bit lower than three years, starting with the Demo-2 industrial crew test flight for NASA in May 2020. Since then SpaceX has launched six crew rotation missions to the ISS in addition to Ax-1. It also launched Inspiration4, a non-public astronaut mission in 2021 that spent three days in space without docking with the ISS.
SpaceX is scheduled to launch up to a few more crewed missions this yr: the Crew-7 mission for NASA, Polaris Dawn private astronaut mission and Axiom’s Ax-3 mission, which is tentatively scheduled for late this yr. While NASA approved the Ax-3 mission in March, Axiom has not yet disclosed the crew for it.