Ax-4 astronauts arrive with "Grace"
After a series of launch delays, private company Axiom Space sent professional astronauts from four nations to the International Space Station in a new SpaceX Dragon capsule the crew named "Grace"
“Grace reminds us that spaceflight is more than just a feat of engineering, but an act of goodwill for the benefit of every human everywhere.”
—Ax-4 Mission Commander Peggy Whitson
Arriving on their newly-named spacecraft Grace, the astronauts of Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) docked with the International Space Station (ISS) at 6:31 a.m. EDT June 26.
Their launch to the space station had faced two weeks of delays — first because of a liquid oxygen leak on their SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and later to allow NASA time to assess repairs to small, but persistent, air leaks on a Russian module of the ISS.
The long-awaited liftoff came at 2:31 a.m. the previous day (June 25), lighting up the night sky over Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Complex 39A.
In the hours before liftoff, the four crew members appeared happy and enthusiastic as they said farewell to family members — from a distance. Their standard two-week pre-launch quarantine had extended to a month because of the delays.
Minutes before launch, engineers ran into problems uploading wind data to the spacecraft’s on board computer — information needed to navigate to splashdown sites in the event of an emergency. But they resolved the problem just in time to keep the countdown clock running. And both the launch and booster landing ran on cue — right up to the sonic boom.
The four-member international crew includes astronauts from Hungary, India, and Poland, under the leadership of Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who’s accumulated more days in space than any other American. Whitson now serves as human spaceflight director for Axiom Space, the Houston-based company behind the Ax-4 mission.
Ax-4 is not space tourism, but a private astronaut mission conducted with NASA’s cooperation. As the aging space station approaches retirement in 2030, the space agency is encouraging private enterprise to build next generation laboratories in low Earth orbit (LEO). According to NASA’s website:
In addition to expanding access of low Earth orbit and the space station to more people, science, and commercial opportunities, NASA’s support of private astronaut missions helps industry develop skillsets to conduct such missions and gain insight into associated costs with future commercial space stations.
Axiom Space, is in the process of building a commercial space lab. The first module of “Axiom Station” is is scheduled to launch into orbit in 2027. At first, modules will be attached to the ISS, but eventually will be released as a free-floating space station.
Nicknamed a “space program in a box,” Axiom Space offers foreign governments with limited human spaceflight infrastructure the ability to send their own astronauts to the ISS using SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft.
The Ax-4 astronauts plan to spend about two weeks on the ISS conducting approximately 60 scientific studies, including one that could create opportunities for people with diabetes to become astronauts. Because liquids act differently in weightlessness, the astronauts will test how insulin pens and glucose monitors perform in space.
If monitors and treatments prove effective in microgravity, diabetes may one day be removed from the list of medical conditions that disqualify astronauts from spaceflight.