Sawt Falasteen - Axiom set for third mission to ISS, carrying European space hopes

With the weather looking favorable, a SpaceX Crew Dragon fixed to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket should blast off Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 4:49 pm local time (2149 GMT), and reach its destination early Saturday.

Dubbed Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3), it is the company's third launch to the space laboratory and the first where all three of the paid seats were bought by national agencies, rather than wealthy individuals.

"It marks a new era of opportunity for countries to join the international space community" and "shifts the paradigm of how space agencies access LEO (low Earth orbit), for exploration and research in microgravity," Axiom Space's chief of mission integration and operations Derek Hassmann said.

Turkish pilot and air force colonel Alper Gezeravci is joined by Marcus Wandt from Sweden, who will be the second Swede in space, and Walter Villadei, an Italian air force colonel who has previously flown to the edge of space on a Virgin Galactic space plane.

They are led by Axiom's Chief Astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, a Spanish and US citizen and former NASA astronaut.

The exact costs haven't been disclosed, but in 2018 when the company first announced the program, which involves chartering SpaceX hardware and paying NASA for services, it set a price tag of $55 million per seat.

More recently, Hungary was reported by spacenews.com to be planning a $100 million deal with Axiom for a future mission involving one astronaut.

- 'Stronger' Turkey -

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has displayed a keen interest in the mission, presenting Gezeravci to the Turkish public in the run-up to his re-election last year, and calling the 21-year air force veteran a "heroic Turkish pilot."

"We see it as a new symbol of the growing, stronger and assertive Turkey," Erdogan said this week.

Sweden's Marcus Wandt, meanwhile, applied for the European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut class of 2022 but was made a reserve. The Axiom-3 mission will therefore allow Sweden to put its second national in space.

Britain, which is striving to build a post-Brexit space strategy, has also signed an agreement for a future mission carrying UK astronauts.

The Axiom-3 team will join seven crew members currently aboard the ISS -- from Japan, Denmark, the United States and Russia -- and carry out 30 experiments, learning more about the impact of microgravity on the human body, advancing industrial processes and more.

Axiom Space was founded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini, a former ISS program manager for NASA, and entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian.

In addition to organizing private missions to the orbital outpost, the company is developing spacesuits for future NASA missions to the Moon, and building a commercial space station that it intends to initially attach to the ISS, then separate and orbit independently sometime before the ISS is retired.

Q.Bulbul--SF-PST