Washington. Three businessmen and a former astronaut took off on Friday aboard a SpaceX rocket on the first completely private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), where they will stay for more than a week.
Liftoff took place at 11:17 a.m. local time (15:17 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida (southeastern United States).
Since 2000, several rookies have traveled to the ISS. Russia last year sent a film crew and a Japanese billionaire. But they all did it aboard Soyuz rockets and accompanied by cosmonauts.
This time it is the Axiom Space company that organized the trip, in collaboration with SpaceX and NASA, paid for the use of its station.
“We are expanding the land frontiers of commerce into space,” said Bill Nelson, head of the US space agency, shortly before liftoff.
“To say that we are happy is an understatement,” the director of Axiom Space, Michael Suffredini, declared at a press conference, stressing that it was the culmination of six years of work together with NASA and SpaceX.
The commander of the mission, called Ax-1, is the Hispanic-American Michael López-Alegría, a former astronaut who has already been on the ISS.
The other members of the team paid tens of millions of dollars to be part of the mission. The role of the pilot is occupied by the American Larry Connor, owner of a real estate firm.
Also on board are Canadian Mark Pathy, head of an investment firm, and former pilot Eytan Stibbe, co-founder of an investment fund.
Stibbe will be the second Israeli astronaut in history, after Ilan Ramon, who died in 2003 in the explosion of the US space shuttle Columbia on his return from the ISS.
“He was a good friend,” Stibbe said at a news conference last week. “I will continue with the experience that he started 19 years ago, focused on observing storms,” he added.
scientific experiences
The four men have a very busy agenda, with some 25 experiences to carry out on aging, heart health or stem cells.
“The experiments that got me up there, coming from Canadian universities and research institutes, probably couldn’t have been done in space without this mission,” Pathy said.
For this reason, among others, is that the members of the Ax-1 reject the description of space tourists.
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