On April 8, 2022 at 15:17 UTC the American SpaceX’s Crew Dragon “Endeavour” (Axiom-1 mission) spacecraft was launched from Kennedy Space Center (LC39A), Florida, USA. The space vehicle was orbited by the “Falcon-9FT” rocket-carrier. There were 4 crew members onboard the Crew Dragon – Commander, Michael López-Alegría, a US citizen and retired NASA astronaut as well as three wealthy paying passengers (Eytan Stibbe from Israel, Larry Connor from the United States, and Mark Pathy from Canada). It’s the first fully commercial mission to the International Space Station. The commercial crew mission, managed by a Houston-based company named Axiom Space, is to last 10 or 11 days. The flight is the first mission to travel to the space station as part of a purely commercial venture. All previous space station missions have been government-led or contracted by a government space agency.

The space vehicle is to dock with the International Space Station on April 9. Michael López-Alegría, Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy will join current ISS expedition members Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, Kayla Barron, Matthias Maurer, Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov.