Saudi astronauts caught a flight to the space station

The Saudi Astronauts’ First Woman Catch a Spacex Flight From Moscow to Space Statistician (STAX 2013). Observational insights from the Russia Space Agency

The guests will have access to most of the station as they conduct experiments, photograph Earth and chat with schoolchildren back home, demonstrating how kites fly in space when attached to a fan.

After decades of shunning space tourism, NASA now embraces it with two private missions planned a year. The Russian Space Agency has been doing it, off and on, for decades.

The current price list shows a per person, per-day cost of up to $2,000 for food and up to $1,500 for sleeping bags. Need to get your stuff to the space station in advance? Figure roughly $10,000 per pound ($20,000 per kilogram), the same fee for trashing it afterward. Want your items back to what they were? The price has to be double.

Axiom won’t say how much Shoffner and Saudi Arabia are paying for the planned 10-day mission. The ticket price was previously cited by the company.

It’s the second flight by a private company to the space station. The first was last year by three businessmen, with another retired NASA astronaut. The company will begin to add its rooms to the station in the not so distant future, then eventually removing them to create a stand-alone outpost.

The visiting crew included a former driver and owner of a sports car racing team, as well as a female commander who holds the U.S. record for most accumulated time in space.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/21/1177445179/saudi-astronauts-including-nations-1st-woman-catch-a-spacex-flight-to-space-stat

The First Flight by a Saudi Arabian Woman to Space: Rayann Barnwal, Ali al-Qarni, and A U.S. Businessman

“This is a dream come true for everyone,” Barnawi said before the flight. It’s important to understand that this is possible. If me and Ali can do it, then they can do it, too.”

Saudi astronauts rocketed toward the international space station on Sunday, in the first voyage by Saudis in decades.

Rayyanah Barnwal is from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and became the first woman from the country to go to space. Ali al-Qarni is a fighter pilot with the Royal Saudi Air Force.

The four should reach the space station in their capsule Monday morning; they’ll spend just over a week there before returning home with a splashdown off the Florida coast.

A retired NASA man is leading the ticket-holding crew for the company that arranged the trip. Also on board: a U.S. businessman who now owns a sports car racing team.

What is the big deal? Last month, she went back to space as commander on a charter flight. It included Saudi Arabia’s first astronauts in decades.

Post-Flight Effort: The Art of Trying to Attempt to Find a Way Out of Its Paradise?

I find it very difficult. I call it the post- flight funk when I don’t know what to think. It’s funny, because when you have that daily routine of, “Here’s how much I want to try and get done today,” it gives you — gives me anyway — a lot of motivation and a lot of direction. The initial return process seems directionless.

It was the death that I saw in space and the life force that I saw coming from the planet — the blue, the beige and the white, and I realized one was death and the other was life.