Saudi Arabia’s first astronauts in decades blasted off to the International Space Station on Sunday in a multimillion-dollar chartered flight. SpaceX launched a ticketed crew led by a former NASA astronaut who now works for the company that arranged the trip. Also on board is an American businessman who now owns a sports car racing team.
The four are expected to arrive at the spacex space station in their capsule on Monday morning; he spends just over a week there before returning home with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.
Rayyanah Barnawi, a stem cell researcher sponsored by the Saudi Arabian government, has become the first woman from the kingdom to go into space. She was joined by Ali al-Qarni, a fighter pilot in the Royal Saudi Air Force.
They are the first from their country to ride a rocket since the launch of a Saudi prince aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1985. They will be welcomed to the station by an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates.
“This is a dream come true for everyone,” Barnawi said before the flight. “Just being able to understand that it’s possible. If me and Ali can do it, so can they.”
Rounding out the guest crew are: Knoxville, Tennessee’s John Shoffner, a former driver and owner of a sports car racing team that competes in Europe, and Lady of the Guard Peggy Whitson, the station’s first commander, who holds the American record for most accumulated time in space: 665 days and counting.
“It was a phenomenal ride,” Whitson said after reaching orbit. Her crewmates clapped with joy.
It is the second private flight to the space station organized by Houston-based Axiom Space. The first was last year by three businessmen and another retired NASA astronaut. The company plans to start adding its own rooms to the station in the next few years, or eventually remove them to create a separate base available for rent.
Axiom would not say how much Shoffner and Saudi Arabia are paying for the planned 10-day mission. The company previously quoted a ticket price of $55 million apiece.
NASA’s latest price list lists charges per person per day of $2,000 for food and up to $1,500 for sleeping bags and other equipment. Need to get your stuff to the space station ahead of time? Expect about $10,000 per pound ($20,000 per kilogram), the same fee for subsequent destruction. Need your items back intact? Double the price.
Guests will have access to most of the station while conducting experiments, photographing Earth and chatting with school children at home, demonstrating how kites fly in space while attached to a ventilator.
After decades of shunning space tourism, NASA is now embracing it with two private missions planned annually. The Russian space agency has been doing this, on and off, for decades.
“Our mission is to expand what we do in low Earth orbit around the world,” said NASA space station program manager Joel Montalbano.
The first stage of the SpaceX booster landed back at Cape Canaveral eight minutes after launch to be recycled for a future flight.
“It was a very, very exciting day,” especially when the booster returned to the launch site, said Axiom’s chief technology officer Matt Ondler. Now comes the rest of the mission, he noted, “all towards the path of what we think is the future of low Earth orbit.”
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