Crew of paying passengers, including Canadian, arrives at International Space Station

The four-member Axiom Mission 1 crew, including Montreal entrepreneur Mark Pathy, arrivedat the International Space Station on Saturday aboard the first all-private charter flight to the ISS.

SpaceX launched its Crew Dragon spacecraft from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.,on Friday for the10-day mission, with the passengers scheduled to spend eight days on the space station.

FinancierandphilanthropistPathy, Ohio real estate and tech entrepreneur Larry Connor, and Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbeeach paid $55 million US for the rocket ride and stay at the ISS.Joining them is retired NASA astronautMichael Lopez-Alegria, who works for Houston-based startup Axiom Space Inc.

The mission includes a series of science experiments. Pathy has saidhe'll be helping to testsomething called holoportation, a new technology thatuses virtual realityfor communication.

He and a colleague at mission control on the ground will us VR headsets to share their experiences. Pathy will also be participating in surveys of Earth from space.

The spacecraft wasset to dockto the Harmony module's space-facing port around 7:45 a.m. ET. However, the docking wasdelayed for about 45 minutes whileNASA resolved an issue with getting a video feed fromDragon.

The new arrivals brought with them two dozen science and biomedical experiments to conduct aboard ISS, including research on brain health, cardiac stem cells, cancer and aging, as well as a technology demonstration to produce optics using the surface tension of fluids in microgravity.

They will be joining the existing ISS occupants of seven regular, government-paid space station crew members three American astronauts, a German astronaut from the European Space Agency and three Russian cosmonauts.

The new mission, a collaboration among Axiom, Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX and NASA, has been touted by all three as a major step in the expansion of space-based commercial activities collectively referred to by insiders as the low-Earth orbit economy, or "LEO economy" for short.

NASA officials say the trend will help the U.S. space agency focus more of its resources on big-science exploration, including its Artemis program to send humans back to the moon and ultimately to Mars.