ESA to fly dedicated Crew Dragon mission to ISS

WASHINGTON — The European Space Agency plans to charter a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station to give more flight opportunities for its astronauts.

At the conclusion of a meeting of the ESA Council on March 19, the agency said member states endorsed a project called ESA Provided Institutional Crew, or EPIC, to send a European crew to the ISS on a Crew Dragon in early 2028.

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said the decision to pursue EPIC was driven by a desire to give ESA’s astronaut corps more chances to go to space in the final years of the ISS, which is scheduled to retire as soon as 2030.

“We have five career astronauts that I intend to fly in the next few years, and EPIC is one way of making sure that these career astronauts can go to the space station, do research and certainly also enlarge our experience and our work on the International Space Station,” he said at a press briefing after the council meeting.

ESA selected five new career, or full-time, astronauts in 2022 with the intent of assigning them to ISS missions before the station is retired. The first of those five to go to space, Sophie Adenot, is currently on the ISS as part of the Crew-12 mission.

The next ESA astronaut expected to go on a long-duration ISS mission is Raphaël Liégeois, but his flight has not been assigned. At an ESA briefing in December, Daniel Neuenschwander, the agency’s director for human and robotic exploration, said he expected Liégeois to go to the station in late 2027 or early 2028.

EPIC is an opportunity to give other ESA career astronauts flight experience given the limited number of long-duration mission opportunities remaining before the station’s retirement.

Aschbacher said EPIC could include some non-ESA astronauts among its four-person crew.

“We plan to implement this with international partners. That means ESA astronauts plus international partners,” he said. “But ESA will be leading this mission, and the mission will be fully operated by ESA.”

ESA has already flown some astronauts to the ISS on short-duration private astronaut missions. Swedish astronaut Marcus Wandt flew on Axiom Space’s Ax-3 mission in 2024, and Polish astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski went to the ISS on Axiom’s Ax-4 mission in 2025.

Both Uznański-Wiśniewski and Wandt were selected in the 2022 class as “reserve,” or part-time, astronauts available to go on specific missions. ESA selected 12 reserve astronauts in that class, including John McFall, who successfully completed a study showing that astronauts with physical disabilities could go to space.

EPIC will differ from those private astronaut missions in several ways, Neuenschwander said at the March 19 briefing. The EPIC mission will last for one month, compared with private astronaut missions that have lasted about two weeks on average.

The EPIC crew, in addition to performing research and other utilization activities on the ISS, will also help the long-term crew with maintenance. Private astronaut missions, he noted, “have a very clear task allocation which is specifically focused on conducting the experiments for which they have trained.”

ESA did not disclose plans for selecting the crew or the anticipated cost of the mission for the agency. Aschbacher said EPIC will be carried out “in close cooperation” with NASA.