The International Space Station on Tuesday welcomed Axiom Mission 2 (X-2) astronauts Peggy Whitson, and John Schoffner, and Saudi Arabia’s first astronauts—Ali Alkarni and… Rayyana Barnawi,
SpaceX’s chartered flight reached the orbiting lab less than 16 hours after blasting off from Florida. The four will spend more than a week aboard the ISS, before returning to Earth in their capsule.
The Axiom astronauts are expected to depart the space station on May 30, pending weather, to return to Earth and splash down at a landing site off the coast of Florida
The Axiom space crew are joining the Expedition 69 crew members aboard the station, including NASA Astronauts Frank Rubio, Woody Hoberg, and Stephen Bowen, United Arab Emirates (UAE) cosmonaut Sultan Alanedi, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin, Andrey Fadeev, and Sergei Prokopyev.
United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Al-Neyadi greeted them with dates, a traditional Arab welcome.
The X-2 crew members were also pinned with the Universal Astronaut Insignia which represents all astronauts.
“It shows how space brings everyone together,” said Saudi Arabia’s first female astronaut, Rayyana Barnawi. “I’m going to live this experience to the max.”
Saudi fighter pilot Ali Al-Qarni dedicated the journey back home to everyone. “This mission is not just for me and Reynah. This mission is also for people with ambition and dreams.”
The Saudi government is picking up the multimillion-dollar tab for both of them.
Only one other Saudi has flown in space before, a prince who flew aboard NASA’s shuttle Discovery in 1985.
John Shoffner, the businessman who started a sports car racing team, is paying his own way. Retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson is his mentor. She works for the Houston company Axiom Space, which organized the 10-day trip, its second to the space station.
NASA is trying to seed a commercial space economy in the region of space known as “Low Earth Orbit,” focusing its energy on missions to the solar system and beyond.
The X-2 is the second fully private mission, after the first to go to the space station in April 2022.
Axiom Mission 1 launched last April at a reported cost of $55 million each for the three private astronauts with the Axiom-planned astronauts. The cost of the X-2’s seats has not been disclosed.
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