Turkey’s first astronaut along with a Swede and Italian launched Thursday, January 18, to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Falcon rocket. The vessel blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral (Florida) in the late afternoon. The three men, all have a background in the military and are all representing their homelands. They're escorted on the trip by a retired NASA astronaut, who now works for the company that arranged the private flight.
Their capsule should reach the space station on Saturday. They will spend two weeks performing experiments, chatting up schoolchildren, and soaking in the views of Earth, before returning home.
It's costing each of the three countries $55 million or more. That's the rough per-person price for the trip, the third such journey organized by the Houston company Axiom Space with NASA and SpaceX. Russia has welcomed paid visitors to the space station for more than two decades; NASA didn't until two years ago.
Among the symbolic items they’re taking up are a Nobel Prize medal from Sweden, fusilli pasta from Italy, and tokens of Turkey’s nomadic culture.