On May 22, 2023, the second-ever private mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was launched from Florida, organized by Axiom Space. The Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) crew took off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 5:37 pm (2137 GMT). The team includes Rayyanah Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher, who is the first Saudi woman to voyage into space and Ali Al-Qarni, a fighter pilot. Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut, who will be making her fourth flight to the ISS, and John Shoffner, a businessman from Tennessee, who is piloting. The crew is due to spend around 10 days on board the ISS, arriving around 9:25 am (1325 GMT) Monday. The mission is not Saudi Arabia’s first foray into space. In 1985, Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, an air force pilot, took part in a US-organized space voyage. The four-member team is set to carry out about 20 experiments while on the ISS. One of them involves studying the behavior of stem cells in zero gravity. They will join seven others already aboard the ISS: three Russians, three Americans, and Emirati astronaut Sultan al-Neyadi, who last month became the first Arab national to go on a spacewalk. Ax-2 is the second Axiom Space mission in partnership with ISS keyholder NASA.
