First Indian, Hungarian and Polish astronauts arrive at the ISS
For the first time an Indian, a Hungarian and a Pole have arrived at the International Space Station (ISS).
A Crew Dragon capsule carrying the three astronauts and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson docked at the ISS on Thursday at 1031 GMT, according to the US space agency NASA.
The capsule had been launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket operated by Elon Musk's space company SpaceX just under 30 hours earlier.
The Ax-4 mission had been postponed several times due to technical problems with the rocket and the ISS. This is the fourth commercial space mission for Houston-based Axiom Space, in collaboration with the US space agency NASA and SpaceX.
While Whitson has been in space several times, this is the first space flight for the three amateur astronauts. Shubhanshu Shukla from India works for his country's air force, while Tibor Kapu from Hungary and Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski from Poland are engineers.
People from all three countries have already been in space, first on Russian Soyuz missions in the 1970s and 1980s, but never before on board the ISS.
The crew of the Ax-4 mission is scheduled to spend around two weeks on board the ISS, where they plan to take part in numerous scientific experiments.
Also currently on the ISS are NASA astronauts Nicole Ayers, Anne McClain and Jonny Kim, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onish, and Russian cosmonauts Kirill Peskov, Sergei Ryzhikov and Alexei Zubritsky.
According to media reports, such a flight costs around $80 million per passenger.
The company organized the first private mission to the ISS in 2022, with more to follow in 2023 and 2024. At just under three weeks, the third Axiom mission was the longest commercial space flight to date.
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