A quartet of private astronauts is racing to catch up with the space station.
Houston-based Axiom Space launched its fourth crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS) overnight, lifting off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KCS), in Florida. The mission got underway early Wednesday, lifting off from KSC's Launch Complex-39A at 2:31 a.m. EDT (0631 GMT).
After a particularly long orbital chase, more than 24 hours between launch and rendezvous, the crew aboard Dragon are scheduled to dock with the space station Thursday morning, around 7:00 a.m. (1100 GMT). You can watch the coverage live on Space.com beginning at 5:00 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT), courtesy of SpaceX and Axiom Space, as well as on the NASA+ streaming service.
The Ax-4 astronauts are riding aboard a brand-new SpaceX crew Dragon, flying its debut mission. As such, naming rights for the spacecraft fell to the crew, who revealed their choice once on orbit. Aboard Crew Dragon Grace is former NASA astronaut and Axiom's director of human spaceflight Peggy Whitson. Whitson holds the record for cumulative days spend in space by an American. That number is currently counting upward from 675, and will reach just shy of 400 by the time the two-week Ax-4 mission returns to Earth.
Whitson is commander for Ax-4, and is joined by a trio of international crew members: Shubhanshu Shukla, from India, serving as mission pilot, Polish mission specialist Sławosz Uznański of the European Space Agency, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary, also a mission specialist. Upon their arrival, the latter three will become the first from their countries to journey on a mission to the ISS.
The Ax-4 astronauts will spend about 14 days aboard the orbiting lab, completing a record number of science investigations and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) outreach events. In total, they have over 60 experiments to undertake — more than any previous Axiom mission to date.
The crew's return date is largely dependent on weather at Dragon's splashdown zone in the Pacific Ocean. It will be SpaceX's second West Coast crew recovery, following a shift from Atlantic Ocean or Gulf recoveries due to the potential for spacecraft debris surviving atmospheric reentry and crashing back to Earth.
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