Sponsored by governments but ferried by a private company, astronauts from Hungary, India and Poland are going to the space station for the first time.
A roaring Falcon 9 rocket propelled four people toward the International Space Station on Wednesday morning, including astronauts from Hungary, India and Poland — three countries that have never sent anyone to the orbiting laboratory before.
It is the fourth mission chartered by Axiom Space, a Houston company that has been at the forefront of an emerging era in government-sponsored space travel. The company allows countries to purchase rides — like airline tickets, but much more expensive — rather than build their own rockets.
It is a useful service for countries that do not have a space program, but it can also be helpful to those that do. Capt. Shubhanshu Shukla, the Indian astronaut who is the pilot and group captain for Axiom’s fourth mission, aims to use his experience on this trip to help India become the fourth country to independently launch people into space.
Two other customers on this mission, known as Axiom-4, are working as mission specialists: Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, a scientist and engineer from Poland who has worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Geneva, and Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer from Hungary. Each man’s country is sponsoring his flight.
The mission commander, Peggy Whitson, who is from the United States and retired from NASA, has served as the I.S.S. commander two times and was the first woman to take on that role. She is Axiom’s director of human spaceflight, and she also led the company’s second mission to the International Space Station in 2023.
After a journey in the same Crew Dragon capsule built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX that carries NASA astronauts to orbit, the Axiom crew is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Thursday morning. Once there, they are expected to stay for about two weeks. They will conduct research for dozens of scientific studies on behalf of 31 nations, including not only the astronauts’ home countries but also Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Nigeria and others.
