The second private mission in the history of the International Space Station (ISS), organized by the American company Axiom Space, was launched on Sunday from Florida, carrying two Saudi astronauts into orbit.
Rayana Barnavi has become the first Saudi astronaut. She was joined by fighter pilot Ali Al-Karni.
The Axiom 2 (Ax-2) mission crew lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 5:37 p.m. ET. The crew also included former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and American businessman John Schoffner, a businessman from Tennessee.
The crew must spend 10 days on board the ISS.
In 1985, Saudi Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, an air force pilot, became the first Saudi citizen to travel into space. The Saudi Space Commission was established in 2018.
The participants in the mission will carry out around twenty experiments on board the ISS, in particular to study the behavior of stem cells in weightlessness.
On board the ISS are now three Americans, three Russian citizens and Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi, who last month became the first citizen of the United Arab Emirates to go into space.
This is the second Axiom space mission carried out in partnership with NASA. The first mission took place in April 2022. Then three businessmen and former astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria went into orbit for 17 days.
Axiom Space plans to build its own space station, with the first module scheduled to launch in 2025.
NASA plans to decommission the ISS around 2030. Instead, several private stations will operate in orbit, as planned. Russia recently agreed to extend the use of the ISS until 2028.
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