Four crew members are set to launch Wednesday on a privately funded mission to the International Space Station.
The journey, arranged by the Houston-based firm Axiom Space, is set to commence at 8 a.m. ET from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The team of four will travel to orbit inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA will broadcast live coverage of the launch beginning at 7:05 a.m. ET on NASA+.
Initially planned for Tuesday, the launch faced a one-day postponement due to strong winds along the Florida coast. This mission, identified as Ax-4, is projected to spend approximately two weeks at the International Space Station.
Leading the mission is former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who holds a record 675 days in space, the most by any American astronaut. She will be joined by pilot Shubhanshu Shukla from the Indian Space Research Organization; mission specialist Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, a Polish scientist with the European Space Agency; and mission specialist Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer hailing from Hungary.
Shukla, Uznański-Wiśniewski and Kapu will make history by becoming the first people from their countries to live and work on the International Space Station.
During their two-week stay at the orbiting lab, the Ax-4 crew members will conduct a host of scientific experiments, according to NASA, including studies of muscle regeneration, how sprouts and edible microalgae grow in microgravity and how tiny aquatic organisms survive at the ISS.
If the launch goes according to plan, the four astronauts will dock at the space station on Thursday at around 12:30 p.m. ET.
The upcoming flight will be Axiom Space’s fourth crewed mission to the International Space Station. The company’s first private expedition to the ISS was in 2022 with an all-civilian crew.
The price tag for the Ax-4 mission has not been publicly disclosed, but space tourists reportedly paid around $55 million per seat on previous Axiom Space expeditions.
