The four crew members of Axiom Space’s Ax-4 mission have departed the International Space Station (ISS) and are on their way home after an 18-day stay aboard the orbital outpost.
Traveling inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon, private astronauts Peggy Whitson (U.S.), Shubhanshu Shukla (India), Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski (Poland), and Tibor Kapu (Hungary) undocked from the ISS at 7:05 a.m. ET on Monday. After a journey time of just over 22 hours, they’re expected to splash down off the coast of Florida in the early hours of Tuesday, July 15.
Axiom Space will livestream the homecoming of the Crew Dragon capsule, including its high-speed descent, parachute deployment, and splashdown.
The crew are in for an exhilarating ride through Earth’s atmosphere before the spacecraft’s parachutes deploy to dramatically reduce its speed prior to splashdown.
On his own trip home in 2020 in what was the Crew Dragon’s first-ever crewed descent from orbit, NASA astronaut Bob Behnken later described the unique experience.
“As we descended through the atmosphere, the thrusters were firing almost continuously,” Behnken recounted. “It doesn’t sound like a machine, it sounds like an animal coming through the atmosphere with all the puffs that are happening from the thrusters and the atmosphere.”
The mission — the fourth private ISS visit organized by Texas-based Axiom Space — involved the most research and science-related activities to date, with the four crew members working on around 60 scientific studies and activities supplied by more than 30 countries.
It’s hoped that the results from their efforts will enhance global knowledge in human research, Earth observation, as well as life, biological, and material sciences.
The Crew Dragon and its four occupants are expected to splash down off the coast of California at about 5:30 a.m. ET (2:30 a.m. PT) on Tuesday, July 15.
Axiom Space will live stream the final moments of the homecoming. You can watch the webcast via the video player embedded at the top of this page, or via Axiom Space’s YouTube channel, which will carry the same feed.
Besides footage from an array of cameras, you’ll also get to hear the live audio communications between the Ax-4 crew and Mission Control.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.