Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: AFP PHOTO / NASA TV 4:35 p.m., January 20, 2024

An all-European crew, including the first Turk to go into space, arrived aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday after a 36-hour journey.

The troop was welcomed by the seven people already on board the flying laboratory: two American astronauts, a Dane, a Japanese and three Russian cosmonauts.

An all-European crew, including the first Turk to go into space, arrived aboard the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday as part of a private mission.

The mission, named Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3), is the third of its kind organized by the American company Axiom Space and the first whose headquarters were all financed by national agencies and not by wealthy individuals.

The spacecraft docked with the ISS at 10:43 a.m. and the crew was on board in about two hours, according to NASA's livestream broadcast.

The Dragon capsule, attached to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, took off Thursday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

She joined the ISS, in orbit 420 kilometers above Earth, after a 36-hour journey, according to the Axiom Space website.

Two weeks aboard the space station

Passengers include Alper Gezeravci, a pilot and colonel in the Turkish Air Force, Walter Villadei, an Italian Air Force colonel who had previously flown aboard a Virgin Galactic spacecraft, and the Swede Marcus Wandt, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA).

The Spanish-American Michael Lopez-Alegria, former NASA astronaut, is the mission commander, employed by Axiom Space to support the three clients.

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The crew was welcomed by the seven people already on board the flying laboratory: two American astronauts, a Dane, a Japanese and three Russian cosmonauts.

Members of the private mission will spend two weeks aboard the space station, during which they must conduct a series of experiments, notably to better understand the impact of microgravity on the human body.

Axiom Space was founded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini, a former manager of NASA's ISS program, and entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian.

Axiom Space plans to build the first commercial space station

In addition to organizing private missions to the space station, the company is developing suits for future NASA lunar missions.

Axiom Space also plans to build the first commercial space station, which will initially be attached to the ISS.

The exact costs of Ax-3 have not been made public, but in 2018, when the company announced its program, including leasing SpaceX equipment and a fee from NASA for use of the station, it had set a cost of $55 million per seat.