The four-person private Axiom-2 mission has docked with the International Space Station to start an eight-day science mission aboard the outpost.
That is the second mission to the ISS by an Axiom Space crew, which used a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to succeed in the orbiting laboratory. Aboard is Axiom Space astronaut (and former NASA astronaut) Peggy Whitson as spacecraft commander, entrepreneur John Shoffner because the pilot, and two astronauts from Saudi Arabia — Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi.
“With this international collaboration, this shows how space brings everyone together,” said Barnawi, who’s the primary Arab woman to fly to space. “It brings [together] even different backgrounds. A few of us are doctors. A few of us are researchers, engineers and so forth. I’m very completely satisfied to be here representing the dreams and hopes of everyone back home.”
Dragon docked autonomously on the space-facing port of the Harmony module at 9:12 a.m. EDT (13:12 UTC) May 22, 2023. SpaceX said this was the fastest launch to docking for a Dragon capsule at 16 hours, 35 minutes.
The 4 person crew opened hatches a pair hours later at about 10 a.m. (14:00 UTC) to affix the seven-person Expedition 69 crew, which incorporates NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg, Emirati astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitry Petelin and Andrey Fedyaev.
With only eight days scheduled on the outpost, the Axiom-2 crew is anticipated to be very busy performing various tasks, including greater than 20 different experiments and technology demonstrations.
That is the primary spaceflight for Shoffner, Alqarni and Barnawi. Nonetheless, that is the fourth time Whitson has been to the ISS, the opposite three having occurred while she was a NASA astronaut.
Whitson holds the record for probably the most time spent in space by an American astronaut — 665 days during her three long-duration ISS missions, plus the planned 10-day duration of the Axiom-2 flight.
The present plan is for the Axiom-2 mission to undock from the space station on May 30 before the spacecraft performs a deorbit burn to reenter Earth’s atmosphere and a parachute assisted splashdown within the ocean off the coast of Florida.