SPACE reports that Axiom Space “named the full crew of four people who will fly to the International Space Station on the Ax-3 mission no sooner than January 2024, in a company announcement Tuesday (Sept. 12).” The crew will be “headed by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, a dual U.S.-Spanish citizen who also commanded Ax-1 in 2022.” Also on board “will be Italian Air Force Col. Walter Villadei, who flew to suborbital space with Virgin Galactic’s first commercial launch in June; Marcus Wandt of Sweden, a European Space Agency astronaut; and Turkey’s first citizen in space, Alper Gezeravcı.” It will “be López-Alegría’s sixth mission, Villadei’s second, and the first for Wandt and Gezeravcı.” Ax-3 will “launch to the ISS from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which is the only American vehicle currently certified by NASA to carry humans to and from the orbiting complex, atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.”
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