India, Poland and Hungary make spaceflight comeback with ISS mission | International Space Station
An American commercial mission carrying the team of India, Poland and Hungary took off on Wednesday at the international space station, taking astronauts from these countries to space for the first time in decades.
Axiom Mission 4, or AX-4, launched from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 2:31 a.m., local time with a brand new dragon capsule from the SpaceX crew leading to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket.
The vehicle must dock with the orbital laboratory on Thursday and stay there up to 14 days.
On board the spacecraft was the Indian test pilot Shubhanshu Shukla, specialists in the Sławosz Uznański-WiśNewski mission and Tibor Kapu of Hungary, and the American commander Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who is now working for the company of the company, which organizes private spaces, among other things.
The last time that India, Poland or Hungary sent people in space, their current harvest of astronauts was not yet born – and at the time, they were called cosmonauts, while they were flying on the Soviet missions before the fall of the iron curtain.
Shukla became the first Indian space since Rakesh Sharma, an Air Force pilot who went to the Salyut 7 space station in 1984 as part of an initiative led by Soviets to help allied countries to access space.
The India Space Agency, ISRO, considers this flight as a key springboard to its own first crew mission, scheduled for 2027 as part of the Gaganyaan program, meaning “sky” in Hindi.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised the successful launch of the AX-4 space mission. “”[Shukla] Takes with him the wishes, hopes and aspirations of 1.4 billion Indians. Wish him as well as other astronauts all the success! He wrote on X.
On board the ISS, Shukla should largely speak with Modi, in a moment of soft power aimed at attaching national pride.
The three countries rely on the bill of their astronauts. Hungary announced in 2022 that it paid $ 100 million for its headquarters, according to Spacenews.com. India and Poland have not revealed how much they spend.
“We have that! Poland has reached the stars,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on X, alongside a video himself watching the launch on a screen at the Copernic Science Center in Warsaw.
“Who knows how many Polish astronauts looked at the launch of Sławosz with me? Everyone was very excited and very proud,” said Tusk in another article, which included a photo of him sitting next to several children of the Science Center.
Several problems have delayed the launch of the AX-4 mission, originally scheduled for early June. He follows an explosive online birth between the American president, Donald Trump, and the SpaceX chief, Elon Musk, the richest person in the world and until recently the ally and advisor to Trump.
Trump threatened to withdraw federal spacex contracts worth tens of billions of dollars, which prompted Musk to threaten an early retreat from Dragon, the only American spaceship currently certified to transport astronauts to the ISS.
Musk fell the threat a few hours later and in the days that followed sought to be more distant, writing on X that he had gone “too far”.
Any break between SpaceX and the American government would be massively disruptive, given NASA and the dependence of the Pentagon in Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy to send the crew, freight, satellites and probes. But for the moment, analysts think that the two parties are too tangled to risk a serious rupture.
The AX-4 flight marks the beginnings of the fifth and last dragon vehicle of the crew, which will be appointed once it has reached orbit, joining effort, resilience, endurance and freedom in the active fleet.
SpaceX ultimately plans to eliminate its current vehicles in the 2030s in favor of Starship, its new generation of development in development.
AX-4 will perform around 60 experiences, including microalgae studies, germinated salad seeds and to what extent microscopic creatures called Tardigrades survive in space.
