ISS welcomes first astronauts from India, Poland, Hungary

The first astronauts in more than 40 years from India, Poland and Hungary arrived at the International Space Station on Thursday, ferried there by SpaceX on a private flight.

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The crew of four will spend two weeks at the orbiting lab, performing dozens of experiments. They launched on Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

America's most experienced astronaut, Peggy Whitson, is the commander of the visiting crew. She works for Axiom Space, the Houston company that arranged the chartered flight.

Besides Whitson, the crew includes India's Shubhanshu Shukla, a pilot in the Indian Air Force; Hungary's Tibor Kapu, a mechanical engineer; and Poland's Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, a radiation expert and one of the European Space Agency's project astronauts on temporary flight duty.

No one has ever visited the International Space Station from those countries before.