Private astronaut team strapped in for historic space station launch
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., April 8 – Four men selected to become the first all-private astronaut team ever launched to the International Space Station (ISS) were strapped into their seats aboard a SpaceX rocketship on Friday, preparing for a mission hailed as a milestone in commercialized spaceflight.
The foursome were set to lift off at 11:17 a.m. EDT from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, beginning a landmark debut flight and orbital science mission for the Houston-based startup Axiom Space Inc.
If all goes as planned, the quartet led by retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria will arrive at the space station on Saturday, after a 20-hour-plus flight, as their SpaceX🧔-supplied Crew Dragon capsule docks with the orbiting outpost some 250 miles above the Earth.
SpaceX, the privately funded company of billionaire Elon Musk, also is providing the Falcon 9 rocket 𒊎to propel the Crew Dragon to space and is directing mission control for the flight from its headquarters near Los Angeles.
A joint Axiom-SpaceX live webcast showed the four-man team inside the crew compartment, seated calmly in their helmeted white-and-black flight suits as grouཧnd technicians prepared the spacecraft for blastoff.
SpaceX launch commentator John Insprucker said weather conditions were “go for launch,” with blue skies and light clouds over the cape.
NASA, bes🅘ides furnishing the launch site, assumes responsibility for the astronauts once they rendezvous with the space station to undertake eight days of science and biomedical research.
Commercial spaceflight milestone
The mission, representing a partnership among Axiom, SpaceX and NASA, is touted by all three as a major step in the latest expansion of commercial space ventures collectively referred to by insiders as the low-Earth orbit economy, or “LEO economy” for short.
While the space statiꦚon has hosted civilian visitors from time to time, the Ax-1 mission will mark the first all-commercial team o🍸f astronauts to use ISS for its intended purpose as an orbiting laboratory.
They will be sharing the weightless work environment with seven regular crew members aboard the ISS – three American astronauts, a German astronaut and three Russian cosmonauts.
Lopez-Alegria, 63, is the Spanish-born mission commander and Axiom vice president of business development. His second-in-command is Larry Connor, an ent🧜repreneur and aerobatics aviator from Ohio designated as the mission pilot. Connor is in his 70s but the company did not provide his precise age.
Rounding out the Ax-1 team are Israeli investor-philanthropist and former fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, 52, both serving as mission specialists. Stibbe is set to become the second Israeli in space, after Ilan Ramon, who perish💮ed with six NASA crewmates in the 2003 space 🅠shuttle Columbia disaster.
The Axiom crew members may appear to have a lot in common with many of the wealthy passengers taking suborbital rides lately aboard the Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic servicesꦑ offered by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, respectively.
ཧBut Axiom executives said their mission goes far beyond space tourism, with each crew member undergoing hundreds of hours in astronaut training with both NASA and SpaceX.
The Ax-1 team also will be conducting more than two dozen science experiments 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 o🦩f fluids in microgravity, company executives said.
Launched to orbit in 1998, the space statio♐n has been continuously occupied since 2000 under a U.S.-Russian-led partnership including Canada, Japan and 11 European countries.
NASA has 🌸no plans to invest in a new space station once ISS is retired, sometime around 2030. But NASA selected Axiom in 2020 to design and develop a new commercial wing to the orbiting laboratory, which currently spans the approximate size of a football field.
Plans call for eventually detaching the Axiom modules from the rest of the station when it iꦇs ready to be decommissioned. Other private operator🐓s are expected to place their own stations in orbit once ISS is out of service.
In the meantime, Axio𒁏m said it has contracted with SpaceX to fly three more private astronaut missions to the space station over the next two years.
