Minutes before a warm front brought heavy showers to Kennedy Space Center, SpaceX launched Crew Dragon aboard a Falcon 9 for Axiom Space on a chartered flight to the International Space Station at 4:49 PM EST this evening. The all-European crew is expected to dock at ISS in two days time, and stay aboard the station until February 3, 2024.

Axiom Space’s Chief Astronaut Michael López-Alegría is the mission commander, and the 65 year old NASA veteran is now on his fifth spaceflight. He is dual-citizen U.S. and Spain. Mission pilot is Italian Air Force Col. Walter Villadei, and the two mission specialists are Alper Gezeravcı of Türkiye and ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt of Sweden. Villadei, Gezeravcı, and Wandt have extensive flight crew experience and have all served in their nation’s Air Forces.

Today’s successful launch came after a one-day delay. With roughly six hours left in the countdown yesterday, SpaceX called for a one-day delay to “allow teams to complete pre-launch checkouts and data analysis on the vehicle.” No other reason was given at the time.

In a January 16th press conference, however, SpaceX did outline some areas of concern: first, parachutes in an uncrewed Dragon mission had performed differently than expected and secondly, the connectors that mate the Crew Dragon capsule to Falcon 9 were torqued incorrectly. While those concerns were not cited in today’s announcement, they may be what mission managers and engineers want to review before committing to a crewed flight.

After completing its job of lofting Crew Dragon off of the launch pad and sending it on its way to orbit, Booster B1080 completed its work by safely touching down at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Landing Zone 1. Previously the booster has also launched the Axiom-2 mission, the Euclid space telescope as well as two Starlink missions.

As usual, the returning booster announced its arrival back to solid ground with twin sonic booms that were heard for dozens of miles around the Space Coast region.

Axiom 3’s Arrival At ISS

Once at ISS Saturday morning, the crew will be greeted by the seven current occupants of the station: Soyuz MS-24/70S commander Oleg Kononenko, Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Chub, NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara, NASA Crew-7 commander Jasmin Moghbeli, European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov.

Planned Experiments

The Axiom crew will get to work quickly after that, and will begin working on an extensive array of experiments that they have planned during their two week stay.

According to Axiom Space, the following experiments will be conducted:

Italy

Axiom stated that the Italian contributions to Ax-3 will include “experiments consist of projects investigating and mitigating the physiological effects of spaceflight on humans; a strong focus on using microgravity to understand biological changes related to health and disease on Earth; and commercial activities related to improved cuisine will also be conducted.

“The Italian portfolio of experiments are sponsored and led by the Italian Air Force (ItAF) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI), involving Italian universities, research centers, and companies wishing to leverage microgravity for biological and technological testing and development.”

Türkiye (Turkey)

“The Turkish portfolio will focus on advanced technological development of novel hardware and capabilities to advance Türkiye’s goals as a space-faring nation and build on its successes in satellite development. These experiments are led by the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Türkiye (TUBITAK).

“The projects are also adopting advanced scientific techniques (e.g., gene editing, metabolomics) to understand the impact of spaceflight on plants and humans. TUBITAK has also sponsored STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) outreach projects for schoolchildren in Türkiye.”

ESA / Sweden

Axiom and ESA were less specific in their portion of flight activities:

“The ESA experiment portfolio consists ofprojectss to build on ESA’s mission to shape the development of Europe’s space capabilities and bring value to the citizens of Europe and the world.

“The portfolio has many activities that supports ongoing ESA projects on the ISS to develop advanced technologies for application on Earth and enable long-term space habitation and exploration.

“Continued work will take place to understand how humans can live and work off-Earth.

“Investigations to understand changes in weather and physical forces in microgravity will further inform ESA researchers exploring fundamental scientific principles.”