In a first, Saudi woman heads off to space

Stem cell researcher and three others take a private rocket to the international station.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Saudi Arabia’s first astronauts in decades rocketed toward the International Space Station on a chartered multimillion-dollar flight Sunday.

SpaceX launched the ticket-holding crew, led by a retired NASA astronaut now working for the company that arranged the trip. Also on board: a U.S. businessman who now owns a sports car racing team.

The four were due to reach the space station Monday morning; they’ll spend just over a week there before returning home with a splashdown off the Florida coast.

Sponsored by the Saudi government, Rayyanah Barnawi, a stem cell researcher, became the first woman from the kingdom to go to space.

She was joined by Ali Qarni, a fighter pilot with the Royal Saudi Air Force.

They’re the first from their country to ride a rocket since a Saudi prince launched aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1985.

“This is a dream come true for everyone,” Barnawi said before the flight. “Just being able to understand that this is possible. If me and Ali can do it, then they can do it too.”

Rounding out the visiting crew: Knoxville, Tennessee’s John Shoffner, former driver and owner of a sports car racing team that competes in Europe; and retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, the station’s first female commander. Whitson holds the U.S. record for most accumulated time in space: 665 days and counting.

It’s the second private flight to the space station organized by Houstonbased Axiom Space. The first was last year by three businessmen, with another retired NASA astronaut. The company plans to start adding its own rooms to the station in another few years, eventually removing them to form a stand-alone outpost available for hire.

Axiom won’t say how much Shoffner and Saudi Arabia are paying for the planned 10-day mission. The company previously cited a ticket price of $55 million each.

NASA’s latest price list shows per-person, per-day charges of $2,000 for food and up to $1,500 for sleeping bags and other gear. Need to get your stuff to the space station in advance? Figure roughly $10,000 per pound, the same fee for trashing it afterward. Need your items back intact? Double the price.

At least the email and video links are free.

The guests will have access to most of the station as they conduct experiments, photograph Earth and chat with schoolchildren back home, demonstrating how kites fly in space when attached to a fan.

After decades of shunning space tourism, NASA now embraces it with two private missions planned a year.

The Russian Federal Space Agency has been doing it, off and on, for decades.

“Our job is to expand what we do in low-Earth orbit across the globe,” said NASA’s space station program manager Joel Montalbano.