(Image credit: SpaceX)
Update for 10:40 p.m. ET on June 10: SpaceX announced on Tuesday evening that it has delayed the planned June 11 launch of the Ax-4 private astronaut mission to the ISS due to a liquid oxygen leak in its Falcon 9 rocket. No new target date has been announced.
The Crew Dragon capsule that will fly SpaceX’s next astronaut mission has arrived at the launch pad.
That flight, called Ax-4, is scheduled to lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket on June 10 from historic Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
SpaceX just took a step toward meeting that timeline: It has delivered the Dragon to Pad 39A’s hangar, the company announced via X on Thursday (June 5).
That capsule — a brand-new vehicle, with no flights yet under its belt — will carry four people to and from the International Space Station (ISS) for the Houston-based company Axiom Space. It will be Axiom’s fourth such mission, which explains the Ax-4 name.
Ax-4 will be commanded by Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who currently serves as Axiom’s director of human spaceflight. She holds the American record for most total time spent in space: 675 days.
Whitson’s three crewmates are India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, who is Ax-4’s pilot, and mission specialists Sławosz Uznański and Tibor Kapu. Uznański, a European Space Agency astronaut, is from Poland, and Kapu is from Hungary.
Nobody from either country, or from India, has ever lived aboard the ISS before, so Ax-4 will break new ground.
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The Ax-4 astronauts are expected so spend two weeks living and working on the ISS, conducting about 60 different science experiments. Then they’ll head back down to Earth, eventually splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
Axiom’s first astronaut mission, Ax-1, launched in April 2022. Ax-2 and Ax-3 followed in May 2023 and January 2024, respectively. All have used SpaceX hardware to get to and from the ISS.
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