Saudi astronauts will fly on SpaceX’s private mission to the International Space Station.It will be the second trip to the ISS for the private space company Axiom Space

Two Saudi astronauts, including the first Saudi woman, will launch from Florida on May 8 on a private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), according to Axiom Space and NASA officials.

Rayyanah Barnawi, a breast cancer researcher, will be the first Saudi woman to travel into space, and she will be joined on the mission by fighter pilot Ali Al-Qarni.

Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who will be making her fourth trip to the ISS, and Tennessee businessman John Shoffner, who will serve as the pilot, will also be on board.

In a briefing to discuss the flight, representatives from Axiom Space and NASA stated that the launch of Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is planned for 10:43 pm Eastern Time on May 8 (08:13 am IST on May 9) from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral.

The four-person crew will travel to the ISS in a SpaceX Dragon capsule and stay for ten days on the orbiting space station.

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The mission to the International Space Station will be Axiom Space’s second.

In April 2022, Axiom Space launched its first private astronaut mission to the International Space Station. As part of Ax-1, four astronauts spent 17 days in orbit.

The Saudi Arabian woman’s participation in the space mission is the latest step the country has taken to shed its notoriously conservative reputation.

However, it is not the kingdom’s first venture into space.

A pilot for the air force named Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz participated in a space mission led by the US in 1985.

United Arab Emirates, which is close by, has also sent astronauts into space. Sultan al-Neyadi, an Emirati astronaut, just spent six months on the International Space Station.