Three businessmen and a former NASA astronaut landed this Monday off Florida aboard a SpaceX capsule, after spending 15 days on the International Space Station as part of a private mission.
According to Agence France Presse, the capsule had left the International Space Station (ISS) 16 hours earlier. The ship resisted the dizzying descent to Earth, thanks to its heat shield, and was then slowed down by huge parachutes.
Organized by the American company Axiom Space, the Ax-1 mission was the first entirely private mission to reach the ISS.
The trip should have taken about a week, but adverse weather conditions kept the mission in orbit for nearly twice as long as planned.
The members of the Ax-1 mission are former astronaut Michael López Alegría and businessmen Larry Connor (USA), Mark Pathy (Canada) and Eytan Stibbe (Israel), who paid, according to US media, 55 million dollars each to join the mission.
The Ax-1 crew carried out scientific experiments and educational and commercial activities on the EEI.
Axiom Space was founded in 2016 with the purpose of creating the first commercial space station, whose first module is expected to be launched in 2024.
Prior to the Axiom Space mission, SpaceX had already flown astronauts from NASA and European counterpart ESA to the International Space Station, replacing the long-standing Russian transport provided by Russian space agency Roscosmos’ Soyuz spacecraft.
On April 2, Roscosmos announced that it will present “concrete proposals” for dates to end cooperation in the ISS, after Western counterparts refused to lift sanctions on Russian companies following Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine.
On December 8th, the eccentric Japanese millionaire Yusaku Maezawa traveled to the EEI for a 12-day stay, thanks to a partnership between Roscosmos and Space Adventures, an American company that exclusively sells flights on Soyuz spacecraft to “home” of astronauts in Earth orbit.
The International Space Station is the result of a partnership between NASA, ESA, Roscosmos and the Canadian counterparts CSA and Japanese JAXA.
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