Former NASA astronaut turned private explorer, Peggy Whitson, embarked on her fifth space mission early Wednesday. She was accompanied by crew members from India, Poland, and Hungary, marking their countries’ initial trips to the International Space Station.
The crew launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at around 2:30 a.m. EDT. This mission is the latest endeavor organized by Texas-based startup Axiom Space, in collaboration with Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX.
The team of four was propelled into space on a towering SpaceX launch vehicle, which consisted of a Crew Dragon capsule mounted on a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket.
Live video showed the towering spacecraft streaking into the night sky over Florida’s Atlantic coast trailed by a brilliant yellowish plume of fiery exhaust.
It marked the first Crew Dragon flight since Musk briefly threatened to decommission the spacecraft after US President Donald Trump threatened to cancel Musk’s government contracts in a high-profile political feud between the two men earlier this month.
Axiom 4’s autonomously operated Crew Dragon was expected to reach the ISS after a flight of about 28 hours, then dock with the outpost as the two vehicles soar together in orbit some 250 miles above Earth.
If all goes according to plan, the Axiom 4 crew will be welcomed aboard the orbiting space laboratory Thursday morning by its seven current resident occupants – three astronauts from the US, one from Japan and three cosmonauts from Russia.
Whitson, 65, and her three Axiom 4 crewmates – Shubhanshu Shukla, 39, of India, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, 41, of Poland, and Tibor Kapu, 33, of Hungary – are slated to spend 14 days aboard the space station conducting microgravity research.
The mission stands as the fourth such flight since 2022 arranged by Axiom as the Houston-headquartered company builds on its business of putting astronauts sponsored by private companies and foreign governments into Earth orbit.
For India, Poland and Hungary, the launch marked a return to human spaceflight after more than 40 years and the first mission to send astronauts from each of those three countries to the International Space Station.
The Axiom 4 participation of Shukla, an Indian air force pilot, is seen by India’s own space program as a kind of precursor to the debut crewed mission of its Gaganyaan orbital spacecraft, planned for 2027.
The Axiom 4 crew is led by Whitson, who retired from NASA in 2018 after a pioneering career that included her tenure as the first woman to serve as the US space agency’s chief astronaut.
She also was the first woman to command an ISS expedition and the first to do so twice.
Now a consultant and director of human spaceflight for Axiom, she has logged a career total of 675 days in space, a US record, during three NASA missions and a fourth flight to space as commander of the Axiom 2 mission in 2023.
The Axiom 4 mission was previously scheduled for liftoff on Tuesday before a forecast of unsuitable weather forced a 24-hour postponement.
