The second-ever private astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS) stays on the right track to lift off this weekend.
NASA, SpaceX and Houston company Axiom Space held a flight readiness review (FRR) today (May 15) for the Ax-2 mission, which is scheduled to launch 4 people toward the International Space Station on Sunday afternoon (May 21).
“At the top of that review, the complete team polled ‘go,'” Ken Bowersox, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, said during a post-FRR press conference this afternoon.
If all goes based on plan, Ax-2 will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 5:37 p.m. EDT (2137 GMT) on Sunday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. The Ax-2 astronauts will ride a SpaceX Dragon capsule to the orbiting lab, getting there around 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) on Monday (May 21).
Related: SpaceX to launch 1st Saudi woman to space on private Ax-2 mission
The mission will spend eight days docked to the ISS, team members said today. That is a slight change from the previous plan, which had called for a 10-day ISS stay.
If Ax-2 cannot get off the bottom on Sunday, it has one other probability on Monday (May 22). If the mission misses that backup opportunity, nevertheless, it should should wait some time to get to space: NASA and SpaceX will then shift toward preparing for the launch of CRS-28, SpaceX’s twenty eighth robotic cargo mission to the ISS, which is slated to lift off from KSC on June 3.
“After which, at the moment, Axiom, NASA and SpaceX will get together and search for the subsequent best opportunity as we take a look at the missions that we now have this summer,” Joel Montalbano, manager for NASA’s International Space Station Program, said during today’s telecon.
Those other flights include crewed jaunts to the ISS comparable to Boeing’s Crew Flight Test (currently targeted for July 21) and SpaceX’s Crew-7 mission, in addition to “other missions that use the pad facilities at Kennedy Space Center,” Montalbano said.
As its name suggests, Ax-2 will likely be the second crewed flight to the ISS operated by Axiom Space using SpaceX hardware. The primary, Ax-1, sent 4 people to the orbiting lab for greater than two weeks in April 2022.
Ax-2 is groundbreaking in its own way as well. Two of the mission’s crewmembers are Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali AlQarni, who will turn out to be the primary Saudi Arabians to go to to the ISS. Barnawi will likely be the primary Saudi woman ever to achieve space.
The opposite crewmates are investor and paying customer John Shoffner and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who now works for Axiom and can command the mission. Whitson has racked up a complete of 665 days off Earth — greater than some other American and some other woman.
NASA currently requires that each one private astronaut flights to the ISS be led by a former agency spaceflyer. Ax-1 was commanded by Michael López-Alegría, who racked up 4 spaceflights while working for NASA.
