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The first fully private crew of astronauts to fly aboard the International Space Station (ISS) set out to land off the coast of Florida on Monday, completing a two-week mission advertised by NASA as a landmark in commercial spaceflight.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the four-member crew of Houston-based startup Axiom Space Inc began its return flight around 9:00 PM EDT on Sunday (1:00 AM Monday GMT) when it disembarked from a space station orbiting about 250 miles (420 km) above the Earth.
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Crew Dragon was expected to parachute into the Atlantic Ocean around 13:00 EDT on Monday (17:00 GMT), limiting the 16-hour journey home from orbit, which was postponed for several days due to inclement weather.
Axiom’s multinational team was led by Spanish-born retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Allegria, 63, vice president of the business development company. His second commander was Larry Connor, a 72-year-old technology entrepreneur and Ohio pilot assigned to the mission.
They were joined as a “mission specialist” by philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eitan Stibe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Patti, 52.
Launched by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 8, they spent 15 days aboard the space station with seven regular, government-paid ISS crew members: three American astronauts, a German astronaut and three Russian astronauts.
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The ISS has hosted several wealthy space tourists from time to time over the years.
But the Axiom Quartet was the first fully commercial team ever to be welcomed to the space station as working astronauts, bringing with it 25 scientific and biomedical experiments to be conducted into orbit. The package included research on brain health, heart stem cells, cancer and aging, as well as a technology demonstration to produce optics using the surface tension of fluids in microgravity.
Axiom, NASA and SpaceX hailed the mission as a milestone in expanding privately funded space trade, which is what industry insiders call the “low-orbit economy” or, in short, the “LEO economy”.
It was the sixth human space flight to SpaceX in nearly two years, after four NASA astronaut missions to the ISS and the Inspiration 4 flight in September, which sent a fully private crew into Earth orbit for the first time, though not into space. station.
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SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Elon Musk, CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc, has been hired to fly three more Axiom astronaut missions to the ISS over the next two years. The price for such excursions is high.
Axiom charges clients $ 50 million to $ 60 million on the spot, according to Mo Islam, head of research at investment company Republic Capital, which owns stakes in both Axiom and SpaceX.
Axiom was also selected by NASA in 2020 to build a new commercial addition to the space station, which a US-Russian-led consortium of 15 countries has been operating for more than two decades. Plans call for the Axiom segment to eventually replace the ISS when the rest of the station retires around 2030 (Report by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles. Edited by Jerry Doyle)
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