Originally only planned to last 15 days on board, Axiom‘s third mission to the International Space Station undocked after 17 full days in space. The crew will spend today in orbit before making a planned splashdown tomorrow morning off of Florida’s coast.
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Thursday afternoon SpaceX launched the Axiom-3 mission out of Kennedy Space Center making it its first human spaceflight mission of the year. Another milestone first was it being the first entirely European crewed mission ever with all four astronauts holding citizenship from a European nation.
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Phil McAlister, director of NASA’s commercial space division, said that Axiom Space and SpaceX were in talks to fly Axiom-3 from SLC-40 rather than LC-39A like in the past. This would use the newly constructed crew access tower built to bring redundancy to SpaceX’s human spaceflight operations.
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