The appointment came about 21 hours after a team of four representing Houston-based startup Axiom Space took off on Friday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, boarding a Falcon 9 rocket launched by SpaceX. The crew of the Dragon Crew was launched into orbit by the rocket that was docked on the ISS at about 8.30 am. ET on Saturday, as the two spacecraft flew about 250 miles over the central Atlantic Ocean, showed a live NASA broadcast. The final approach was delayed due to a technical error that interrupted the video stream used to monitor the capsule’s appointment with the space station. The error forced Crew Dragon to stop and hold its position 20 meters away from the station for about 45 minutes, while mission control solves the problem. Once the connection was reached, it was expected to take about two more hours to compress the sealed passageway between the space station and the crew capsule and check for leaks before the hatches opened, allowing the newly arrived astronauts to board. The multinational Axiom team, which planned to spend eight days in orbit, was led by retired Spanish-born Nasa astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, 63, the company’s vice president of business development. His second was Larry Connor, a real estate and technology businessman and aerobatic aviator from Ohio who was named as the mission pilot. Connor is in his 70s – the company did not give his exact age. Completing the Ax-1 crew was investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and a Canadian businessman and philanthropist, Mark Pathy, 52, who both served as mission experts. Stibbe became the second Israeli to fly into space, after Ilan Ramon, who died with six members of the Nasa crew in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle crash. They will join the existing ISS crew of seven regular, government-paid crew members of the space station: three American astronauts, a German astronaut from the European Space Agency and three Russian cosmonauts.
