Dragon Launches Axiom’s Fourth Private Mission to the Space Station

At 2:31 a.m. EDT, the crew of Axiom Mission 4 launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, en route to the International Space Station (ISS).

Leading the commercial mission is Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut and now Axiom Space’s director of human spaceflight. Shubhanshu Shukla, an astronaut from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is serving as the mission’s pilot. The crew also includes two mission specialists: Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski from Poland, a project astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA), and Tibor Kapu from Hungary.

NASA will conclude its launch coverage approximately 15 minutes after liftoff, following Dragon’s orbital insertion.

The Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to dock autonomously with the space-facing port of the ISS’s Harmony module around 7 a.m. on Thursday, June 26. NASA will begin live coverage of the rendezvous and docking on  NASA+ starting at 5 a.m.