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The first astronauts in more than 40 years from Poland, Hungary and India arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday, ferried there by SpaceX on a private flight.
The crew of four, who blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre on Wednesday, will spend two weeks at the orbiting lab, performing dozens of experiments.
America’s most experienced astronaut, Peggy Whitson, is the commander of the visiting crew. She works for Axiom Space, the Houston company that arranged the chartered flight.
Besides Whitson, the crew includes India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, a pilot in the Indian Air Force; Hungary’s Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer; and Poland’s Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, a radiation expert and one of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) project astronauts on temporary flight duty.
No one has ever visited the International Space Station from any of those countries before.
“It’s an honour to have you join our outpost of international cooperation and exploration,” NASA’s Mission Control radioed from Houston minutes after the linkup high above the North Atlantic.
The new arrivals shared hugs and handshakes with the space station’s seven full-time residents, celebrating with drink pouches sipped through straws.
Six nations were represented: four from the US, three from Russia and one each from Japan, India, Poland and Hungary.
“It’s so great to be here finally. It was a long quarantine,” Whitson said, referring to the crew’s extra-long isolation before lift-off to stay healthy.
They went into quarantine on 25 May, stuck in it as their launch kept getting delayed. The latest postponement was for space station leak monitoring, NASA wanted to make sure everything was safe following repairs to a longtime leak on the Russian side of the outpost.
It’s the fourth Axiom-sponsored flight to the space station since 2022.
The company is one of several that are developing their own space stations due to launch in the coming years.
NASA plans to abandon the International Space Station in 2030 after more than three decades of operation and is encouraging private ventures to replace it.