Hungarian Astronaut Launched Into Space

Following several delays in the past few weeks, Hungarian astronaut Tibor Kapu took off for the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the Axiom-4 mission at 8:31 a.m. Central European Time on June 25 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The four-member crew of the Axiom-4 commercial mission took off aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft launched by a Falcon 9 rocket.

The commander of the Ax-4 mission, American Peggy Whitson (65), an astronaut with Axiom Space, is going into space for the fifth time, while the others are on their first space trip. Shubhanshu Shukla (40), an Indian pilot with the Indian Space Research Organisation, Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski (41), a Polish mission specialist, is flying in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Polish Space Agency, and Tibor Kapu (34), a mission specialist, is flying on behalf of the HUNOR (HUNgarian to ORbit) Hungarian astronaut program.

The mission is part of the transition to commercial spaceflight and is being carried out in collaboration between Axiom Space, SpaceX, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Twenty-five experiments and programs will be carried out as part of the Hungarian Hunor program. The aim of the research is to expand our knowledge of space and its effects on humans and materials.

Hungary is participating in the mission with its second astronaut, but the first one to reach the International Space Station, which has been in operation since 1998. Hungarian Bertalan Farkas traveled to space (more precisely to the Salyut-6 space station) in 1980 as part of the Interkosmos program.

The four-member crew will conduct nearly 60 scientific experiments from 31 countries, highlighting the global significance and collaborative nature of the mission to advance microgravity research in low Earth orbit (LEO). The number of scientific experiments is a record; never before have so many experiments been conducted during an Axiom Space mission on the International Space Station. Among other things, experiments will be conducted in the fields of medicine, cancer research and diabetes.