A NASA veteran, astronaut Peggy White, launched today the fifth space flight of her career, with an astronaut crew from India, Poland and Hungary who will pay their first visit as representatives of their country to the international space.

The 65 -year -old White and her three colleagues – 39 -year -old Subansu Soukla from India, 41 -year -old Polish Slavoz Uznanski -Visnievski and 33 -year -old Tibor somewhere from Hungary – are scheduled to spend 14 days.

For India, Poland and Hungary, launch marked the Return to manned space flights after more than 40 years and first shipment sending astronauts From each of these three countries at the International Space Station.

Indeed, the involvement of the Indian Air Force pilot, Subansu Soukla, in Axiom 4 is considered by India’s space program as a kind of forerunner for the first manned mission of the Gaganyaan spacecraft, scheduled for 2027.

Musk spaceship launch

The astronaut team took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Kanaveral, Florida, around 06:30 GMT, launching the latest mission organized by the newly established Axiom Space company based in Texas in collaboration with the Aerospace Technology Company.

The Axiom 4 mission was scheduled to take off on Tuesday, but a prognosis of inappropriate weather conditions forced the mission to postpone it for 24 hours.

The four -member crew boarded a tall SpaceX launch vehicle consisting of a Crew Dragon capsule, mounted on a 9 -stage Falcon rocket.

This was Crew Dragon’s first flight since Musk threatened to decline the spaceship for a while, responding to President Trump’s threat to cancel Musk’s government conventions earlier this month.

CREW DRAGON was expected to reach the ISS after a flight of about 28 hours and then tied to the guard, as the two vehicles would fly together about 400 km above the Earth.

If everything goes according to the plan, the Axiom 4 crew will be welcomed in the space lab on Thursday morning by its seven current passengers – three Astronauts from the US, one from Japan and three cosmonauts from Russia.

The mission is the fourth such flight since 2022 organized by Axiom, as the Houston -based company is based on its business to put astronauts orbiting the land, funded by private companies and foreign governments.