Florida June 1 (BNA): An all-American team of private astronauts and two Saudis, including the first Arab woman sent into orbit, landed safely off Florida on Tuesday night, capping off an eight-day research mission aboard International Space Station. station (ISS).
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that was carrying them has parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City, Florida, after a 12-hour reentry flight back into Earth’s atmosphere.
The live broadcast was via a joint webcast provided by SpaceX and the company behind the mission, Axiom Space.
The second space station mission organized, equipped and trained entirely at private expense by Axiom, the 7-year-old Houston-based company headed by NASA’s former International Space Station program director, has concluded, according to Reuters.
The Axiom 2 crew was led by retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, 63, who holds the American record for most time spent in orbit with 665 days in space during three long-duration missions to the International Space Station, including 10 spacewalks. She is now Director of Human Spaceflight at Axiom.
“It was an exceptional flight. We really enjoyed all of it,” Whitson radioed to mission controllers moments after splashing about.
The pilot assigned to the Ax-2 was John Shoffner, 67, an Alaskan pilot, race car driver, and investor.
The crew concluded as mission specialists the first two astronauts from Saudi Arabia to fly on a private spacecraft — Ali Al-Qarni, 31, fighter pilot with the Royal Saudi Air Force; and Rayana Barnawi, 34, a biomedical scientist in cancer stem cell research.
Barnawi is the first Arab woman to launch into orbit around the Earth and the first Saudi woman to fly in space.
In August 2022, Sarah Sabry became the first Arab woman and the first Egyptian to fly into space on a short suborbital flight run by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin astronomy tourism project.
The stay of the International Space Station by Al-Qarni and Bernawi was also marked by its overlap with the stay of Sultan Al-Neyadi, a member of the ISS Expedition-69 crew from the United Arab Emirates, which was the first time that three astronauts from the Arab world were on board the space station together.
The Axiom 2 mission, which launched May 21, was the latest in a series of spaceflights funded by private venture capital and wealthy passengers rather than taxpayers’ money, as NASA seeks to expand commercial reach into low Earth orbit.
Axiom, which sent its first four-member astronaut team to the International Space Station in April 2022, also signed a contract with the US Space Agency to build the first commercial addition to the orbiting laboratory.
California-based SpaceX, which was founded by Twitter owner and CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc. Elon Musk, supplied the Falcon 9 rocket and crew capsule that ferried the Axiom team to and from orbit and controlled flight.
NASA provided the launch site at its Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and took charge of the Axiom crew during their stay aboard the space station, which orbits 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
HF