The first fully custom mission arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) early Saturday with a four-man crew from Axiom Space.

NASA hailed its three-way partnership with Axiom and SpaceX as an important step towards commercializing the so-called “low Earth orbit.”

The US space agency will now focus on more ambitious trips to the depths of the cosmos.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon Endeavor capsule docked with the ISS at 1229 GMT on Saturday and the crew entered the space station about two hours after launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday.

Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) is headed by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, of dual American and Spanish nationality, who flew into space four times during his 20-year career and last visited the ISS in 2007. .

He is accompanied by three paying passengers: American real estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian investor and philanthropist Mark Pathy, and Israeli ex-fighter pilot, investor and philanthropist Eytan Stibbe.

“We’re here to try, but we understand it’s our responsibility to make sure everything works out,” Connor said during NASA’s livestream as the first civilian crew.

Tickets, which included eight days aboard the space station before a final leap across the Atlantic, cost $55 million.

The Ax-1 is the first fully private crew mission to fly a private spacecraft to the ISS. Houston-based Axiom pays SpaceX for transportation, and NASA charges Axiom for use of the space station.

research projects

On the ISS, orbiting 400 kilometers above sea level, the quad will conduct 25 research projects, including a demonstration of MIT’s smart tile technology that creates a robotic swarm and self-assembles into space architecture.

Another experiment involves using cancer stem cells to grow mini-tumors, followed by exploiting the accelerated aging environment of microgravity to identify biomarkers for early detection of cancers.

“Our guys don’t go there for eight days to take pictures and observe from the dome,” Axiom Space’s director of operations, Derek Hassmann, told reporters at a pre-launch briefing.

Eytan Stibbe plans to commemorate his late friend, Ilan Ramon, who was the first Israeli astronaut to die when his spacecraft shattered on its way back to the ISS in the 2003 Space Shuttle disaster..

Stibbe brings salvaged pages from Ramon’s diary to the station and memories of his children.

The Axiom crew will live and work alongside the station’s regular crew: three Americans and one German on the US side, and three Russians on the Russian side.

The company has partnered with SpaceX for a total of four missions, and NASA has approved the second Ax-2 in principle.

Axiom sees these journeys as the first steps towards a greater goal: to build its own private space station, the first module of which will be launched in 2024.

The structure will be added to the ISS first, something expected around 2030, before becoming autonomous once the orbiting lab is disabled..