“The additional time allows teams to complete pre-launch checks and data analysis on the vehicle,” he noted on his X (formerly Twitter) account.
The Ax-3which will be commanded by the Hispanic-American Michael López-Alegríawas scheduled to take off this Wednesday at 5:11 p.m. local time (9:11 p.m.) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, in central Florida.
Traveling with Alegría will be the Italian pilot Walter Villadei and two mission specialists: the Turkish Alper Gezeravci – the first national from that country to fly into space – and the Swede Marcus Wandt.
According to NASA, it is the first time that the crew, who will be on the ISS for 14 daysis totally European.
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Ax-3, the first manned commercial mission sponsored by the European Space Agency (ESA), will take off in a Dragon capsule powered by a Falcon 9 rocketboth from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
Ax-3 has as aim to help usher in a new era of privatized ISS utilization which will provide medicinal advances, among many others, at the same time will allow the development of a solid and sustainable market in low Earth orbit (LEO) by advancing research in microgravity.