On Saturday (Apr. 9), the three space travelers on the first commercial crew to visit the International Space Station arrived onboard the orbiting station and were immediately pinned as the world's newest astronauts.
Their arrival came roughly 21 hours after a four-man crew from Houston-based firm Axiom Space Inc launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX-launched Falcon 9 rocket on Friday.
At about 8:30 a.m., the Crew Dragon capsule was launched into orbit by a rocket docked with the International Space Station. A live webcast of the connection from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration showed the two spacecraft flying around 250 miles (420 km) above the central Atlantic Ocean at 12:30 p.m. EDT on Saturday.
A technical problem with a video feed used to monitor the capsule's rendezvous with the ISS delayed the final approach by nearly 45 minutes, but everything else went properly.
The arrival of Axiom-1 (Ax-1) commander Michael López-Alegra, the first former NASA astronaut to return to the space station, was marked by a brief pinning ceremony honoring his crewmates Larry Connor of Ohio, Mark Pathy of Canada, and Eytan Stibbe, Israel's second citizen to fly into space. The four astronauts arrived aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour at the space station.
Each Ax-1 astronaut spoke briefly on their arrival at their new home and research platform for the next eight days as they were pinned.
"I'm thrilled and honored to be up here," Connor said, becoming only the second private astronaut to pilot an orbital spaceflight. "Many thanks to SpaceX for such an amazing journey; no pun meant, but it was out of this world."
The Ax-1 crew will participate in a multi-disciplinary science program sponsored by the ISS U.S. National Laboratory in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Canadian Space Agency, Montreal Children's Hospital, Ramon Foundation, and Israel Space Agency during their stay on the space station. They'll also work for Axiom Space.
While the space station has occasionally hosted civilian visitors, the Ax-1 mission marks the first time an all-commercial team of astronauts has been sent to the ISS for its intended purpose as an orbiting research laboratory.
The commander of the Expedition 67 crew, NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, welcomed the Axiom-1 crew to the station and recognized the milestone they were reaching together.
