The first all-private team of astronauts ever launched to the International Space Station (ISS) were welcomed aboard the orbiting research platform on Saturday to begin a weeklong science mission hailed as a milestone in commercial spaceflight.
Their arrival came about 21 hours after the four-man team representing Houston-based startup company Axiom Space Inc. lifted off on Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, riding atop a SpaceX-launched Falcon 9 rocket.
The multinational Axiom team, planning to spend eight days in orbit, was led by retired Spanish-born NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, 63, the company's vice president for business development. With docking achieved, it took nearly two hours for the sealed passageway between the space station and crew capsule to be pressurized and checked for leaks before hatches were opened to allow the newly arrived astronauts to come aboard the ISS.
Lopez-Alegria later pinned astronaut wings onto the uniforms of the three spaceflight rookies of his Axiom team -- Connor, Stibbe and Pathy -- during a brief welcome ceremony. NASA officials say the trend will help the U.S. space agency focus more of its resources on big-science exploration, including its Artemis program to send humans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars.
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