A SpaceX capsule carrying astronauts from India, Poland, Hungary and the United States has landed in California, completing the 20-day Axiom Mission 4.
The crew undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday and landed on earth on Tuesday after a 22-hour journey.
The return flight concluded the fourth ISS mission organised by US startup Axiom Space in collaboration with SpaceX, the private rocket venture of billionaire Elon Musk.
For the non-American trio, the mission marked a return to crewed spaceflight for their respective nations after decades.
The crew launched from the Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida on June 25 for a mission where they conducted about 60 scientific experiments.
“Thanks for the great ride … Happy to be back,” Commander Peggy Whitson, an Axiom employee and former NASA astronaut, said after the splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego.
Whitson, 65, retired from NASA in 2018 after a pioneering career that included becoming the US space agency’s first female chief astronaut and the first woman ever to command an ISS expedition.
Also on board were pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India and mission specialists Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of Poland and Tibor Kapu of Hungary.
For rising space power India, the participation of Shukla, an Indian air force pilot, is seen by India’s space program as a precursor, of sorts, to the debut crewed mission of its Gaganyaan orbital spacecraft, planned for 2027.
I join the nation in welcoming Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla as he returns to Earth from his historic mission to Space. As India’s first astronaut to have visited International Space Station, he has inspired a billion dreams through his dedication, courage and pioneering…
Uznanski-Wisniewski is a Polish astronaut assigned to the European Space Agency, while Kapu is part of his country’s Hungarian to Orbit (HUNOR) programme, though he is not the first person of Hungarian descent to board the space station.
Billionaire Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born software designer who became a US citizen in 1982, has twice visited the ISS as a space tourist, in 2007 and 2009, hitching rides on board Russian Soyuz capsules.
Axiom-4 also marks the 18th crewed spaceflight logged by SpaceX since 2020, when Musk’s rocket company ushered in a new NASA era by providing American astronauts their first rides to space from US soil since the end of the space shuttle program nine years earlier.
Source: Aljazeera
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