The four astronauts on the mission Ax-1the first entirely private to arrive at the International Space Station (ISS), successfully returned to Earth on Monday aboard the SpaceX ship Dragon Endeavour.
As planned, the Dragon Shark It fell in a controlled manner in Atlantic waters near Jacksonville, on the northeast coast of Florida (USA), at 17:12 GMT and several ships from the SpaceX company came to pick it up and help the crew to get out.
Images from Axiom Space showed the time of the capsule’s entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, the landing and the immediate approach of the launches and the recovery ship of the capsule, which was hoisted aboard the vessel.
“Welcome back to Earth. We hope you enjoyed the trip”: These were some of the words addressed to the crew by the control room of the Kennedy Space Center of the US space agency NASA in Cape Canaveral (Florida).
Before leaving the ISS on Sunday, the mission commander, the Hispanic-American Miguel Lopez-Alegriawho was previously part of NASA and made several space trips with the US agency, told the control center in Houston by radio that it had been a “longer and more fascinating adventure than they thought.”
Along with him participated in this mission the businessmen Larry Connorfrom the United States; Mark Pathy (Canada) and Eytan Stibbe (Israel), who, according to US media, each paid 55 million dollars (51.3 million euros at current exchange rates) to the company Axiom Space, responsible for and organizer of the trip.
Axiom Space intends to send other similar missions to the ISS and build the first private station in low Earth orbit to end of this decade, with the purpose of becoming a “global academic and commercial center”, according to its website.
Members of the Ax-1 mission stated before departing for the ISS on April 8 that they were not tourists and, in fact, they carried out scientific experiments and educational and public outreach programs in the space laboratory.
The ride back a Tierra had to be postponed on several occasions -the last one on Saturday, April 23 for twenty-four hours- due to the adverse weather conditions prevailing in the landing zone.
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The departure of the Dragon Endeavor spacecraft from the ISS makes possible the trip, several times overdue, of another manned mission, the Crew-4, to the space lab.
In principle, takeoff from Cape Canaveral of the rocket with the Dragon Freedom spacecraft is scheduled for Wednesday, April 27.