Peggy Whitson Leads Axiom Spaces Fourth Commercial Mission to the ISS: A Veteran Astronauts Journey into Space

Peggy Whitson, the most experienced astronaut in the United States, is leading an international crew of first-time fliers from India, Poland, and Hungary on a privately-funded flight to the International Space Station. This is the fourth non-government mission organized by Houston-based Axiom Space.

Strapped into a new, as-yet-unnamed SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule making its maiden flight, the crew is expected to blast off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 2:31 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. This is roughly the moment when Earth's rotation carries the rocket into the plane of the space station's orbit, a requirement for rendezvous missions.

Whitson's crewmates are test pilot Shubhanshu Shukla of India, European Space Agency astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland, and Hungarian engineer Tibor Kapu. All three are making their first space flight.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft, serial number C213, is the fifth and final addition to SpaceX's fleet of astronaut ferry ships built for NASA flights to the space station and for privately-funded commercial missions to low-Earth orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage booster, B1094, will be making its second flight. After propelling the Crew Dragon out of the lower atmosphere, the first stage will attempt a return-to-launch-site landing at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. To date, SpaceX has pulled off 466 successful first stage landings, 63 of them in Florida.

The launch was originally planned for June 11 but was delayed due to work to resolve an oxygen leak in the Falcon 9's first stage plumbing and renewed concern about small but persistent air leaks in a Russian compartment aboard the space station that connects the lab's aft docking port to the Zvezda service module. The leakage in the PrK vestibule was first noticed in 2019 and has been closely monitored ever since. The compartment is closed off unless a Russian spacecraft is using that docking port.

Assuming an on-time liftoff, Whitson, Shukla, Uznański, and Kapu will dock at the space-facing port of the station's forward Harmony module at 7 a.m. on Thursday. They will be welcomed aboard by NASA Crew 10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nicole Ayers, Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, Japanese flier Takuya Onishi, along with Soyuz MS-27 crewmates Sergey Ryzhikov, Alexey Zubritsky, and NASA's Jonny Kim.

Whitson, who holds a doctorate in biochemistry and retired from NASA in 2018, now works for Axiom. She ranks ninth in the world for time in space, No. 1 in the world among female astronauts, and No. 1 overall among U.S. astronauts. Going into the Ax-4 flight, Whitson had logged 675 days in space across three NASA flights and one post-retirement mission for Axiom Space.

As if all that's not enough, she's also the world's most experienced female spacewalker - seventh in the world overall - with 10 excursions totaling 60 hours and 21 minutes. She was the first female and non-military chief of NASA's astronaut office and served as the first female commander of the International Space Station.

"I think I'm somewhat addicted to space," she said in an interview with CBS News. "I really like being there