European crew arrives at ISS

Pilots from Turkey and Italy as well as a Spanish and Swedish astronaut join the space station’s crew from Japan, Denmark, US and Russia

An all-European crew including Turkey’s first astronaut arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday on a voyage chartered by Axiom Space.

Dubbed Axiom Mission 3 or Ax-3, it is the company’s third launch to the space laboratory and the first where all three of the paid seats were bought by national agencies, rather than wealthy individuals.

The spacecraft docked at the ISS at 1043 GMT and boarded within about two hours, according to National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s livestream of the event.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon fixed to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida on Thursday.

It arrived at the ISS, which flies around 420 kilometers above the Earth, after a journey of about 36 hours, according to Axiom Space’s website.

Turkish pilot and air force colonel Alper Gezeravci is joined by Walter Villadei, an Italian air force colonel who has previously flown to the edge of space on a Virgin Galactic space plane, and by Marcus Wandt from Sweden, who is representing the European Space Agency.

They are led by Axiom’s Chief Astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, a Spanish and US citizen and former NASA astronaut.

The Axiom-3 team were welcomed with hugs by the seven crew members already aboard the ISS — from Japan, Denmark, the United States and Russia.

The new arrivals will spend about two weeks carrying out 30 experiments, learning more about the impact of microgravity on the human body, advancing industrial processes and more.