International Space Station welcomes first astronauts from Poland, Hungary and India

Published connected 26/06/2025 - 18:19 GMT+2•Updated 18:42

The first astronauts successful much than 40 years from Poland, Hungary and India arrived astatine nan International Space Station connected Thursday, ferried location by SpaceX connected a backstage flight.

The unit of four, who blasted disconnected from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre connected Wednesday, will walk 2 weeks astatine the orbiting lab, performing dozens of experiments.

America's astir knowledgeable astronaut, Peggy Whitson, is nan commandant of nan visiting crew. She useful for Axiom Space, nan Houston institution that arranged nan chartered flight.

Besides Whitson, nan unit includes India's Shubhanshu Shukla, a aviator successful nan Indian Air Force; Hungary's Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer; and Poland's Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, a radiation master and 1 of nan European Space Agency's (ESA) task astronauts connected impermanent formation duty.

No 1 has ever visited nan International Space Station from immoderate of those countries before.

"It's an honour to person you subordinate our outpost of world practice and exploration," NASA's Mission Control radioed from Houston minutes aft nan linkup precocious supra nan North Atlantic.

The caller arrivals shared hugs and handshakes pinch nan abstraction station's 7 full-time residents, celebrating pinch portion pouches sipped done straws.

Six nations were represented: 4 from nan US, 3 from Russia and 1 each from Japan, India, Poland and Hungary.

"It’s truthful awesome to beryllium present finally. It was a agelong quarantine," Whitson said, referring to nan crew's extra-long isolation earlier lift-off to enactment healthy.

They went into quarantine connected 25 May, stuck successful it arsenic their motorboat kept getting delayed. The latest postponement was for abstraction position leak monitoring, NASA wanted to make judge everything was safe pursuing repairs to a longtime leak connected nan Russian broadside of nan outpost.

It's nan 4th Axiom-sponsored formation to nan abstraction position since 2022.

The institution is 1 of respective that are processing their ain abstraction stations owed to motorboat successful nan coming years.

NASA plans to wantonness nan International Space Station successful 2030 aft much than 3 decades of cognition and is encouraging backstage ventures to switch it.