Global Courant 2023-05-22 06:10:45
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Saudi Arabia’s first astronauts in decades blasted off Sunday on a multimillion-dollar charter flight to the International Space Station.
SpaceX launched the ticketed crew, led by a retired NASA astronaut who now works for the company that arranged the trip. Also on board: an American businessman who now owns a sports car racing team.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the Dragon capsule and a crew of four private astronauts, lifts off from pad 39A, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sunday. (AP Photo/John Raoux)John Raoux / AP
The four should reach the space station in their capsule on Monday morning; they’ll spend a little over a week there before returning home with a splash off the Florida coast.
Rayyanah Barnawi, sponsored by the Saudi Arabian government, a stem cell researcher, became the first woman from the kingdom to go to space. She was accompanied by Ali al-Qarni, a fighter pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force.
They are the first from their country to ride a rocket since a Saudi prince boarded shuttle Discovery in 1985. United Arab Emirates.
“This is a dream come true for everyone,” Barnawi said before the flight. “Just being able to understand that this is possible. If me and Ali can do it, so can they.”
Rounding out the visiting crew: John Shoffner of Knoxville, Tenn., a former racecar driver and owner of a sports car racing team competing in Europe, and Commander Peggy Whitson, the station’s first female commanding officer to hold the U.S. record for most accumulated time in space: 665 days and counting.
“It was a phenomenal ride,” said Whitson after reaching orbit. Her crewmen clapped their hands in joy.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crew, from left, Saudi Arabian astronaut Rayyanah Barnawi, Commander Peggy Whitson, John Shoffner of Knoxville, Tennessee, and Saudi Arabian astronaut Ali al-Qarni arrive at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Town Canaveral, Fla. , before their launch to the International Space Station, Sunday. (AP Photo/John Raoux)John Raoux / AP
It is the second private flight to the space station to be hosted by Houston-based Axiom Space. The first was through last year three businessmen, featuring another retired NASA astronaut. The company plans to add its own rooms to the station in a few years, eventually removing them to form a self-contained outpost available for rent.
Axiom would not say how much Shoffner and Saudi Arabia will pay for the planned 10-day mission. The company had previously quoted a ticket price of $55 million each.
NASA’s most recent price list shows costs per person, per day of $2,000 for food and up to $1,500 for sleeping bags and other gear. Do you need to bring your stuff to the space station ahead of time? Calculate about $10,000 per pound, the same fee for throwing it away afterwards. Do you want your belongings back intact? Double the price.
In any case, the email and video links are free.
The guests can access most of the station as they conduct experiments, photograph the Earth and chat with schoolchildren back home, and demonstrate how kites fly in space when attached to a fan.
After shunning space tourism for decades, NASA is now embracing it with two scheduled private missions per year. The Russian space agency has been doing it intermittently for decades.
“Our job is to expand what we’re doing in low Earth orbit around the world,” said NASA’s space station program manager Joel Montalbano.
SpaceX’s first stage booster landed back at Cape Canaveral eight minutes after launch, to be recycled for a future flight.
“It was a very, very exciting day,” especially when the booster returned to the launch site, Axiom’s chief technology officer, Matt Ondler, said. Now the rest of the mission, he noted, “is all moving toward what we think is the future of low Earth orbit.”
