The crew will have a busy slate of experiments and educational student outreach events during their eight days at the space station. Credit: Michael Cain / Spaceflight Now / Coldlife Photography SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off with Axiom Space’s Ax-2 commercial astronaut mission. “I am very honored and happy to be representing all the dreams and all the hopes of all the people in Saudi Arabia, and all the women back home in the region, and this is a great opportunity for me to represent the country, to represent their dreams,” Barnawi said last week in a pre-launch press conference. “For me, as a fighter pilot, I’ve always had the passion of exploring the unknown and just admiring the sky and the stars, so it was a great opportunity for me to pursue this passion that I have, and maybe fly among the stars,” Alqarni said.
They are first Saudi Arabians to fly to the International Space Station, and Barnawi will be the first Arab woman to reach the complex. The Saudi government is paying for their rides to space and back. Two Saudi astronauts took the the other two seats on SpaceX’s Dragon Freedom spacecraft.Īli Alqarni is an F-15 fighter pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force and Rayyanah Barnawi is a biomedical scientist. Otherwise, the capsule is designed to fly to the space station on autopilot, along with commanding from SpaceX’s ground team in California.
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Whitson and Shoffner are also trained on how to take over manual control of the Dragon spacecraft if necessary. The company procured launch and transportation services with SpaceX, who trained the crew members on emergency procedures. XyZC2MJEq5Īxiom is managing the Ax-2 mission. Liftoff of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast, boosting two Americans and two Saudi astronauts toward the International Space Station. I grew up in the age of the early Space Race, so getting here now and having a chance to fulfill that excitement is very, very powerful to me.” “I’ve been a fan of space since I was a child. “I feel like I’ve been preparing for this my entire life,” Shoffner said. He is also an experienced pilot with more than 8,500 hours of flying time, a veteran skydiver with more than 4,000 jumps to his credit, and an amateur race car driver. Shoffner, 67, founded Dura-Line, a telecom company specializing in in the placement of fiber optic cables. Pilot John Shoffner, who paid for his seat on the Ax-2 mission, joined Whitson for the trip to space. “It’s good to be here, this was a phenomenal ride,” Whitson radioed mission control shortly after the launch. The mission, known as Ax-2, follows Axiom’s first commercial crew flight to the station last April. She joined Houston-based Axiom Space after leaving NASA, and is commanding the company’s second private astronaut mission to the space station. She has logged 665 days in orbit, more time in space than any other American, and completed 10 spacewalks in her NASA career. The 63-year-old astronaut retired from NASA in 2018 after her third space mission, a nearly 10-month expedition on the space station in 20. Whitson, selected as a NASA astronaut in 1996, is an Iowa native who earned a PhD in biochemistry from Rice University. EDT (1324 UTC) Monday to begin an eight-day stay at the complex. With the on-time launch Sunday, Whitson and her crewmates will dock at the space station’s Harmony module at 9:24 a.m. Nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines flashed to life and powered the Falcon 9 off the pad with 1.7 million pounds of thrust, sending the rocket and crew on a trajectory northeast over the Atlantic Ocean to take aim on the space station. SpaceX dodged a risk of anvil clouds from nearby thunderstorms that threatened to violate the Falcon 9’s weather criteria. EDT (2137:09 UTC), when Earth’s rotation brought Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center under the orbital path of the International Space Station. The 215-foot-tall (65-meter) Falcon 9 rocket lifted of at 5:37:09 p.m. EDT (1900 UTC) Sunday, then ground teams evacuated the pad to allow SpaceX to start loading liquid propellants into the Falcon 9 rocket shortly after 5 p.m. The four-person crew strapped into their seats on SpaceX’s Dragon Freedom spacecraft around 3 p.m. Follow us on Twitter.įormer NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, with more time in space than any other American, rocketed back into orbit for the fourth time Sunday, riding a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher from Florida with a fare-paying investor and private pilot, and the first two Saudi Arabian astronauts to fly to the International Space Station.
The Falcon 9 will launch SpaceX’s Dragon Freedom spacecraft with four commercial astronauts on the Ax-2 mission to the International Space Station. EDT (2137 UTC) on Sunday, May 21, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Watch a replay of our coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 5:37 p.m.
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