The all-civilian Ax-1 mission crew docked on the Worldwide Area Station early Saturday morning, marking the primary time personal residents visited the spacecraft.

SpaceX’s Dragon Spacecraft, carrying the four-person crew, arrived at ISS simply earlier than 8:30 a.m. EST following a virtually 21-hour journey that launched from the Kennedy Area Heart in Florida.

Docking was initially delayed about 45 minutes as a result of some technical points with the video.

“Mission groups labored to route video utilizing a SpaceX floor station to the crew on the house station permitting Dragon to proceed with docking,” a press launch states.

Video posted on Twitter by Axiom Area, the Houston-based firm that organized the flight, confirmed the house station astronauts welcoming and hugging the Ax-1 crew. They are going to be aboard the house station for the subsequent eight days.

The Ax-1 crew is led by Michael López-Alegría, a retired NASA astronaut who now serves because the vice chairman of enterprise growth for Axiom Area. He is joined by three paying clients: American actual property investor Larry Connor, Canadian businessman Mark Pathy and Eytan Stibbe, a former fighter pilot from Israel. Connor, Pathy and Stibbe paid $55 million apiece for the expertise, as The Related Press reported this 12 months.

Whereas on the house station, they’ll take part in science experiments and philanthropic tasks, together with health-related analysis for the Mayo Clinic and the Montreal Kids’s Hospital.

Axiom Area stated the mission is a “precursor” to commercializing low-Earth orbit, and stated it intends to fly no less than three different industrial flights to the house station. Additionally it is planning to assemble its personal privately-funded house station in orbit.