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Update : The launch is now schedule for January 19 . The below textbook has been updated to muse the new launch date .
Axiom Spaceis gearing up to launch its third full secret astronaut delegacy to the International Space Station . Here ’s all you need to know .
The bunch of four will take off from NASA ’s Kennedy Space Center on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 at 4:49 necropsy EST on Friday , January 19 .
The crew is notable for being so international : it include NASA astronaut and Axiom employee Michael López - Alegria ; Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei ; Alper Gezeravci , Turkey ’s first cosmonaut ; and Marcus Wandt , an cosmonaut with the European Space Agency . They will be travel in a Crew , Dragon ballistic capsule , the same abridgement built by SpaceX that ferryboat NASA astronauts to and from the ISS .
It will be López - Alegria ’s six spaceflight and his 2nd time traveling to the place with Axiom . Per NASA rule , all private foreign mission to the ISS must be led by a former NASA cosmonaut . Villadei previously fell on Virgin Galactic ’s first sub - orbital flying , Galactic 01 , last summer .
The Dragon capsule is scheduled to autonomously dock with the ISS on Saturday . The crew will stay on the post for 14 day , where they ’ll lead more than 30 scientific experiment and demonstrations . Axiom ’s 4th mission is schedule for as soon as October of this class .
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The foreign mission , called Ax-3 , was originally scheduled for November 2023 , but slipped due to weather and other programming issues with SpaceX. Houston - based Axiom ’s first secret mission establish in April 2022 and the 2nd followed in May 2023 .
But Axiom is not stopping at secret spaceman missionary post — as if that was n’t ambitious enough . Instead , the company aims to eventually seize commercial-grade modules to the ISS , that Axiom have and operates , which would detach by the end of the decennary to become a loose - wing Axiom Space Station . The first section , which isbeing formulate by European aerospace manufacturer Thales Alenia Space , is schedule to found in 2026 . While there are other secret blank station projects under ontogeny , notably by Blue Origin and Voyager Space , Axiom ’s is the only one that will associate with the station before it is decommission in 2030 .
