First All-Private Astronaut Crew Blasts Off To International Space Station

On Friday, the first all-private crew to head to the International Space Station launched.

According to Reuters, the flight is being “hailed by industry executives and NASA as a milestone in the commercialization of low-Earth orbit.”

The crew blasted off at 11:17 a.m. EDT, departing from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The outlet noted, “Live video webcast by Axiom showed the 25-story-tall SpaceX launch vehicle – consisting of a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket topped by its Crew Dragon capsule – streaking into the blue skies over Florida’s Atlantic coast atop a fiery, yellowish tail of exhaust.”

“Nine minutes after launch, the rocket’s upper stage delivered the crew capsule into its preliminary orbit, according to launch commentators. Meanwhile, the rocket’s reusable lower stage, having detached from the rest of the spacecraft, flew itself back to Earth and safely touched down on a landing platform floating on a drone vessel in the Atlantic,” the outlet added.

If everything is successful, the group will get to the space station on Saturday, following a flight of more than twenty hours, “and the autonomously operated Crew Dragon will dock with the orbiting outpost some 250 miles (400 km) above the Earth.”

Kate Tice, a launch commentator, said the liftoff was “absolutely picture-perfect” and a member of the crew was heard saying to mission control, “That was a hell of a ride.”

SpaceX tweeted a video of the launch on Friday:

Falcon 9 launches the first all-private human spaceflight mission to the @space_station pic.twitter.com/krDfQyaVTO

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 8, 2022

The project is a collaboration between Axiom, SpaceX, and NASA. 

“We’re taking commercial business off the face of the Earth and putting it up in space,” NASA chief Bill Nelson said prior to the flight, noting that the change allows his group to concentrate on sending humans to the moon, Mars, and other areas of deep space. 

Reuters noted:

Launched to orbit in 1998, the space station has been continuously occupied since 2000 under a U.S.-Russian-led partnership including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.

NASA has no plans to invest in a new space station once ISS is retired, sometime around 2030. But NASA selected Axiom in 2020 to build a new commercial wing to the orbiting laboratory, currently spanning the length of a football field.

Plans call for eventually detaching the Axiom modules from the rest of the station when it is ready to be decommissioned. Other private operators are expected to place their own stations in orbit once ISS is out of service.

As The Daily Wire previously reported, the launch was originally set for Wednesday, but an Axiom spokesperson announced Monday that the pushback would give SpaceX more time to finish pre-launch processing tasks.

The crew of four men include Lopez-Alegria, the mission commander and vice president of business development at Axiom. Joining him will be Larry Connor, a tech and real estate businessman. “Rounding out the Ax-1 team are investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, 52, both serving as mission specialists,” Reuters added.

Stibbe will be the second Israeli in space, following Ilan Ramon, who died with six NASA crew members in the 2003 Columbia shuttle tragedy. 

Lopez-Alegria pointed out that the crew “are not space tourists” at a previous news briefing, per Reuters. Lopez-Alegria explained that the crew has gone through intense astronaut training with SpaceX and NASA. They will also be conducting biomedical research.

“It is the beginning of many beginnings for commercializing low-Earth orbit,” Axiom’s co-founder and executive chairman, Kam Ghaffarian, told Reuters in an interview. “We’re like in the early days of the internet, and we haven’t even imagined all the possibilities, all the capabilities, that we’re going to be providing in space.”

The international implications of space travel have been ever-present as the world watches the ongoing conflict in Ukraine after Russia invaded the country. 

Last month, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth after spending 355 days at the International Space Station in a new United States record.

As The Daily Wire reported, Vande Hei came back in a Russian capsule, landing in Kazakhstan, after his journey. He returned with Russian Space Agency’s Pyotr Dubrov, who spent the past year in space as well, and Anton Shkaplerov.

Russia and the United States work together in space and “NASA has said it cannot operate the station without the Russians, which provide the propulsion that allows the ISS to keep its orbit and maneuver when needed. Russia needs NASA, as well, as the space agency provides power to the Russian segment of the station,” per The Washington Post.

Before leaving the space station, Shkaplerov called his fellow astronauts “my space brothers and space sister.”

“People have problem on Earth. On orbit … we are one crew,” Shkaplerov reportedly said in a live NASA TV broadcast. The space station is a symbol of “friendship and cooperation and … future of exploration of space.”

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