Author of the article: The International Space Station (ISS) was photographed by Expedition 56 crew members from a Soyuz spacecraft after its release, October 4, 2018. Photo by NASA / Roscosmos / Handout via REUTERS
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The International Space Station (ISS) is set to become busier than usual this week as its crew welcomes four new colleagues from the Houston-based startup Axiom Space, the first all-private team of astronauts ever flown into orbit. .
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The launch is being hailed by the company, NASA and other industry players as a turning point in the latest expansion of commercial space projects collectively referred to by insiders as the low-Earth economy or, for short, the “LEO economy”. Weather permitting, the Axiom crew of four were to take off Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket that had been furnished and flown by the Elon Mason Space Launcher. . If all goes well, the quartet, led by retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, will arrive at the space station 28 hours later as the SpaceX-provided Crew Dragon capsule lands on the ISS about 400 kilometers above Earth. Lopez-Alegria, 63, is Axiom’s Spanish mission commander and vice president of business development. He will be joined by Larry Connor, a real estate and technology businessman and aerobatic aviator from Ohio who has been named as the mission pilot. Connor is in his 70s, but the company did not give his exact age.
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The Ax-1 team is completed by investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, 52, who both serve as mission experts. Stibbe is set to become the second Israeli in space, after Ilan Ramon, who was killed along with six members of the NASA crew in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle crash. The Ax-1 crew may seem to have a lot in common with many of the wealthy passengers who have been taking sub-orbital rides lately with the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic services offered by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, respectively. But Axiom executives said their mission was more substantial. “We are not space tourists,” Lopez-Alegria said in a recent news release, adding that the Axiom team has undergone extensive astronaut training with both NASA and SpaceX and will conduct substantial biomedical research.
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‘MANY PRINCIPLES’ “It’s the beginning of many principles for the commercialization of the low Earth orbit,” Axiom co-founder and CEO Kam Ghaffarian told Reuters. “We are like the first days of the Internet and we have not even imagined all the possibilities, all the possibilities that we will provide in space.” The so-called Ax-1 team will carry equipment and supplies for 26 science and technology experiments that will be conducted before they are scheduled to leave orbit and return to Earth 10 days after launch. These include research into brain health, heart stem cells, cancer and aging, as well as a demonstration of technology for producing optics using the surface tension of liquids in microgravity, company officials said.
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Launched in 1998, the ISS has been under constant occupation since 2000 as part of a US-Russia-led partnership, including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries. While the space station has hosted visits from political visitors from time to time, the Ax-1 mission will mark the first exclusively commercial group of astronauts to use the ISS for its intended purpose as a laboratory in orbit. They will share the weightless workplace with seven regular ISS crew members – three American astronauts, a German astronaut and three Russian cosmonauts. Axiom has said it has contracted with SpaceX to launch three more missions into orbit over the next two years. NASA selected Axiom in 2020 to design and develop a new commercial wing on the space station, which is currently the size of a football field. Flight equipment for the first Axiom unit is under construction, the company said. Sorry, but this video failed to load. The plans eventually require the Axiom units to be disconnected from the rest of the outpost when the ISS is ready to withdraw, around 2030, leaving the smaller Axiom station in orbit as a platform for commercial use only, Ghaffarian said. Other private operators are expected to put their own stations in orbit as soon as the ISS is decommissioned. As Kathy Lueders, NASA’s space operations partner, described Axiom’s role in a recent press conference, “This will be an important collaboration in the future.”
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