For the first time in over 40 years, astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday aboard a private SpaceX flight.
The four-member crew, launched Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, will spend two weeks conducting numerous experiments aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Leading the mission is Peggy Whitson, America’s most seasoned astronaut, who now works with Houston-based Axiom Space — the company that organized the chartered trip.
Joining Whitson are India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, an Indian Air Force pilot; Hungary’s Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer; and Poland’s Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, a radiation specialist and European Space Agency astronaut temporarily assigned to the mission.
This marks the first time astronauts from these nations have visited the ISS. Previously, the last individuals from these countries to travel to space did so in the late 1970s and 1980s, flying with Soviet missions.
