CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The first astronauts in more than 40 years from India, Poland and Hungary arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday, ferried there by SpaceX on a private flight.
The crew of four will spend two weeks at the orbiting lab, performing dozens of experiments. They launched Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
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 project astronauts on temporary flight duty.
No one has ever visited the International Space Station from those countries before. The time anyone rocketed into orbit from those countries was in the late 1970s and 1980s, traveling with the Soviets.
“It’s an honor 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 U.S., 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 liftoff to stay healthy.
They went into quarantine on May 25, 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.