Iowa astronaut returns from mission to International Space Station

Astronaut Peggy Whitson of Iowa, who commanded the private spacecraft launched 10 days ago and bound for the International Space Station, safely splashed down with the rest of the crew late Tuesday off the coast of Florida.

The crew, commanded by the former NASA astronaut who is now Axiom Space’s director of human spaceflight, spent eight days aboard the space station, orbited the Earth 126 times and traveled 3,331,440 miles, according to Axiom. The craft returned at 10:04 p.m. Iowa time Tuesday.

The Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX, which was chartered by Axiom Space, lifted off May 21 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida -- marking the second group of private citizens to fly with Axiom to the space station, and offering a reminder of how quickly human space flight is evolving from the days when only national governments had the wherewithal to train and launch people into space.

Axiom conducted the training for this flight and commissioned the SpaceX launch. Axiom's long-term goal is to build its own space station in low Earth orbit and continue to send people from all over the world to it. It also holds a contract from NASA to build the spacesuits that astronauts will wear on the surface of the moon as part of the space agency's Artemis program.

Axiom did not disclose the cost of the trip, but a previous mission cost $55 million a seat. That first mission, in 2022, to the space station included three wealthy business executives who were accompanied by Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut who serves as Axiom's chief astronaut.

Whitson, who grow up in Beaconsfield in south central Iowa and was a keynote speaker at The Gazette’s Iowa Ideas symposium in 2021, is a decorated NASA astronaut who has completed 10 spacewalks and spent 665 days in space -- more than any other American. Now as Axiom's director of human spaceflight, the mission built on her impressive legacy with her fourth spaceflight mission.

She was joined on the mission by Rayyanah Barnawi, a biomedical researcher who specializes in stem-cell research, who became the first woman from Saudi Arabia to go to space. Ali Alqarni, also representing Saudi Arabia, is a former member of the Saudi air force and an accomplished pilot.

John Shoffner, an American businessman who founded a fiber-optic cable company, served as the pilot. He's a lifelong space enthusiast who got his pilot's license when he was 17. Now, he flies in air shows and races sports cars.

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For years, NASA did not allow private citizens to visit the space station, though Russia did. NASA changed its policy in 2019 in a nod to the growing commercial space sector, which the space agency now relies on for a number of crucial missions, including flying its own astronauts to the space station.

Axiom plans to launch its first space station module in 2025. That module would be attached to the International Space Station and would help the company get more people to space.

The Washington Post contributed to this report.