An all-private astronaut crew splashed down safely off Florida on Tuesday night, capping an eight-day research mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) that was hailed as a milestone in commercial spaceflight. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying them from Houston-based startup Axiom Space — including Commander Peggy Whitson and Pilot John Shoffner, both of whom paid for their seats to the orbiting lab — departed the ISS on Monday morning and began the 16-hour return flight.
The astronauts, whose mission was sponsored by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, blasted off on a Falcon 9 rocket on May 21 from the Kennedy Space Center. The Axiom Space astronauts joined the Expedition 69 team of ISS members for medical research, public outreach, and several experiments, such as studying how low levels of gravity affect stem cells and human messenger RNA cells that assist protein synthesis.
Axiom Space aims to fly two private astronaut missions to the ISS annually and eventually launch its multimodule, free-flying commercial station in low Earth orbit. Its first modules are expected to be launched in 2025, and the company hopes to assemble them at the ISS by 2030.
Axiom has already sent its first astronauts on a test flight to the ISS. Retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, a 63-year-old former ISS program manager, is Axiom’s vice president of business development and is leading the second all-private space station mission. He is joined by businessman Larry Connor, a real estate and technology entrepreneur from Ohio; aerobatics aviator Eytan Stibbe, also of Ohio; and investor-philanthropist Mark Pathy, of Canada.
After a rendezvous with the station, the Axiom Space astronauts and ISS crew members conducted several spacewalks and science experiments. Whitson, who has logged more time in space than any other American, extended her record by passing Russia’s Fyodor Yurchikin for ninth place overall for total days in orbit. The Axiom Space astronauts also tested an airborne communications system that could be used for future private crewed space flights and a device to harvest bacteria from the body to study their impact on health and disease in microgravity.
On Tuesday, the Axiom Space crew retrieved an experiment, returned it to the station, and then began the long return trip. The astronauts undocked from the ISS’s Harmony module’s space-facing port at 12:05 p.m. and made a 12-hour return flight to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City, Florida.
The Crew Dragon, which carries Axiom Space employees and others on private flights, was the third spacecraft to dock to the ISS since it was built and certified for regular use by NASA in August. The Crew Dragon will be the only commercial spacecraft to visit the ISS regularly until a new vehicle is developed to replace the aging Shuttle fleet.
