Astronauts head to space station on chartered flight
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Turkey’s first astronaut, a Swede and an Italian have set off for the International Space Station on a chartered SpaceX flight.
The Falcon rocket blasted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in late afternoon, carrying the three men, all with military pilot experience and representing their homelands.
Their escort on the trip is a retired Nasa astronaut who now works for the company that arranged the private flight.
Their capsule should reach the space station on Saturday.
They will spend two weeks performing experiments, chatting to schoolchildren and soaking in the views of Earth, before returning home.
It is costing each of the three countries $55 million dollars (€51m) or more.
That is the rough per-person price for the trip, the third such journey organised by the Houston company Axiom Space with Nasa and SpaceX.
Russia has been welcoming paid visitors to the space station for more than two decades, but Nasa did not until two years ago.
Turkey’s Alper Gezeravci, a former fighter pilot and captain for Turkish Airlines, is the first person from his country to rocket to space.
He noted Turkey just celebrated its 100th anniversary, and, until now, the nation’s view of the sky has been limited to “what we could see with our bare eyes”.
“Now this mission is opening that curtain all the way,” he told reporters before the flight.
“This is the beginning of our next centennial.”
Also flying are Sweden’s Marcus Wandt, a former fighter pilot and test pilot for Swedish Aeroplane Corporation who was chosen in 2022 as a reserve astronaut by the European Space Agency, and Italian Air Force Colonel Walter Villadei, who flew to the edge of space last summer with Virgin Galactic.
Among the symbolic items they are taking up are a Nobel Prize medal from Sweden, fusilli pasta from Italy and tokens of Turkey’s nomadic culture.
With them is Michael Lopez-Alegria, who launched four times as a Nasa astronaut before joining Axiom Space and escorting its first chartered flight.