AP Cape Canaveral (Florida)

Cape Canaveral (Florida)

Updated Thursday, January 18, 2024-23:22

  • Exploration Astronaut Miguel López-Alegría returns to space on a private mission, the first entirely European

Spanish astronaut Miguel López-Alegría, 65, along with the first Turkish astronaut, a Swede and an Italian, took off this Thursday towards the

International Space Station

on a chartered SpaceX flight.

The Falcon rocket lifted off from

NASA's Kennedy Space Center

late in the afternoon, carrying the four men, all of them with experience as military pilots and representatives of their home countries.

Their capsule should arrive at the space station on Saturday.

They will spend two weeks conducting experiments, chatting with schoolchildren and enjoying views of Earth

,

before returning home.

The trip will cost Sweden, Turkey and Italy $55 million or more.

That is the approximate price per person for the trip, the third of its kind organized by the Houston company

Axiom Space

with NASA and

SpaceX.

Russia has been welcoming paying visitors to the space station for more than two decades;

NASA didn't do it until two years ago.

Turkish Alper Gezeravci, former fighter pilot and captain of Turkish Airlines, is the first person from his country to travel by rocket to space.

He noted that Turkey just celebrated its centenary and that, until now, the nation's view of the sky was limited to "what we could see with our own eyes."

"Now this mission is pulling that curtain back all the way," he told reporters before the flight.

"This is the beginning of our next centennial."

Swede Marcus Wandt, a former Swedish Airplane Corp. fighter pilot and test pilot who was chosen as a reserve astronaut by the European Space Agency in 2022, and Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei, who flew to the edge of space on last summer with Virgin Galactic.

López-Alegría declared during a press conference on January 11, the research they are going to do will help understand the effects of lack of gravity on the human body or the mechanisms behind certain diseases such as cancer, and include stem cell research.