The crew of the first completely private mission docked at the International Space Station on Saturday after a flight of more than twenty hours, as shown in live images by the US space agency NASA. Previously, astronauts had to wait about 45 minutes twenty meters from the ISS because of a problem with a video camera needed for the docking maneuver.
Four Axiom booklets
The group – formed by the Spanish-American astronaut Michael López-Alegría, the American businessman Larry Connor, the Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe and the Canadian investor Mark Pathy – visited a space capsule “Crew Dragon” at the Cape Canaveral, in the State of Florida began. The messenger informed. His trip to the ISS is organized by the private space company Axiom Space in cooperation with NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
Visit planned for about a week
There have been individual space tourists on the ISS several times, but the so-called “Ax-1” mission is the first completely private crew. The four Axiom airmen are expected to stay aboard the ISS for about a week and carry out scientific experiments.
Full house
Among other things, they will meet German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who has been at the station since November and is expected to stay until the end of April. American astronauts Thomas Marshburn, Raja Chari and Kayla Barron and the three cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov are also currently working on the ISS.