Cape Canaveral, Florida — NASA veteran Peggy Whitson, now a private astronaut, blasted off on her fifth spaceflight early Wednesday, leading a diverse crew that includes the first astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary to visit the International Space Station (ISS). The mission, organized by Axiom Space and launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, marks another milestone in the era of commercial spaceflight.
The Axiom-4 crew lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 2:30 a.m. EDT, their Crew Dragon capsule piercing the night sky with a fiery trail. The team—comprising Whitson (65, USA), Shubhanshu Shukla (39, India), Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski (41, Poland), and Tibor Kapu (33, Hungary)—will spend 14 days conducting microgravity experiments aboard the ISS. For India, Poland, and Hungary, this mission represents their first crewed spaceflight in over 40 years and their debut on the ISS.
Whitson, a record-holding astronaut with 675 days in space, previously made history as the first woman to command the ISS twice and NASA’s first female chief astronaut. Now leading Axiom’s human spaceflight efforts, she returns to orbit as the oldest woman in space—proving that experience transcends age. Meanwhile, Shukla’s flight is a stepping stone for India’s Gaganyaan program, which aims to launch its first crewed mission by 2027.