Axiom names first private crew to pay $ 55 million for trip to ISS

A US real estate investor, a Canadian investor and a former Israeli Air Force pilot are paying $ 55 million each to be part of the first fully private astronaut crew to make it to the International Space Station. The trio will be hitchhiking on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule early next year, with a veteran NASA astronaut as their commander.

The Ax-1 mission, hosted by Houston, Texas-based space tourism company Axiom Space, is a watershed moment for the space industry as companies fight to make space travel more accessible to private customers rather than to governments. Private citizens have visited the space station in the past, but the Ax-1 mission is the first to use a commercially-built astronaut capsule: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which carried its first two crews to the ISS last year.

“As the first completely private mission to go to the ISS, we feel a huge responsibility to do it well,” said Michael López-Alegría, veteran astronaut and mission commander. The edge Tuesday. “We realize that this is the trendsetter, the barometer of the future, so our goal is to exceed all expectations.”

Larry Connor, nonprofit entrepreneur and activist investor; Mark Pathy, Canadian investor and philanthropist; and Eytan Stibbe, a former Israeli fighter pilot and impact investor, were revealed by Axiom on Tuesday morning as the company’s inaugural crew. Connor, 71, is chairman of The Connor Group, an Ohio-based luxury real estate investment firm. He had become the second oldest person to fly in space after John Glenn, who piloted the US space shuttle Discovery at 77.

The crew’s flight to the space station, an orbital laboratory some 250 miles above Earth, will last two days. They will then spend approximately eight days aboard the US segment of the station, where they will participate “in research and philanthropic projects,” Axiom said in a statement. Living alongside astronauts working in the United States, Russia, and possibly Germany, the private crew members will deploy sleeping bags somewhere on the station.

“There isn’t an astronaut crew quarters for us, which is good. Sleeping in Zero-G is pretty much the same wherever you are once you close your eyes, ”López-Alegría said.

NASA updated its policies in 2019 to allow private astronaut flights to the ISS as part of a larger campaign to encourage business opportunities in space. The agency had previously opposed private visits to the ISS on US spacecraft. Seven private citizens flew to the station as wealthy tourists on separate missions in the early 2000s aboard Russian Soyuz vehicles.

Private stays on the space station will come at a steep price, according to NASA’s 2019 announcement. It will cost $ 11,250 per astronaut per day to use life support systems and toilets, $ 22,500 per day for all necessary supplies for the crew (like food, air, medical supplies, etc.) and $ 42 per kilowatt hour for electricity. This works out to a nightly rate of about $ 35,000 per person, which for the four crew members of the Ax-1 mission – including Commander López-Alegría – is $ 1.1 million. dollars for an eight night stay.

Image: NASA

Those nightly costs are included in the $ 55 million price private astronauts are already paying, Axiom says. The company advertises itself as a “turnkey, full-service mission provider that interfaces with all other parties (eg NASA) for” astronauts, an Axiom spokesperson said. “All necessary costs are part of Axiom’s ticket price.”

The Ax-1 mission will need to be approved by the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel, the space station management body of partner nations that includes the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan and others. This approval process began today, said López-Alegría. “I don’t think there is any doubt that the background and qualifications of the crew are more than enough to be accepted by the MCOP, so I feel good about that,” he added.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, an acorn-shaped capsule that can accommodate seven people, was approved last year by NASA as part of its commercial crew program to transport humans to the space station. As part of the roughly $ 4.5 billion program, SpaceX has developed Crew Dragon alongside rival Boeing, which is about a year away from certifying its Starliner capsule for human flights. The two companies have contracts with NASA to perform six missions carrying American astronauts into space.

The Ax-1 mission was announced early last year. This is SpaceX’s second space tourism effort, which announced around the same time that it was also working with space tourism firm Space Adventures to send up to four private citizens to orbit the Earth. in 2022.

Image: NASA

Space tourism in recent years has sparked a wave of interest from the ultra-rich and investors alike as a growing group of space companies prove hardware and accelerate unmanned test flights in and around from space. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, now the richest person in the world, has made the normalization of space travel and the colonization of Mars SpaceX the top priority. Billionaire businessman Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, which gives groups of four a few minutes of weightlessness in his massive space plane for a few hundred thousand dollars, has become the first publicly traded space tourism company in 2019. And the space company of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin will soon be offering similar suborbital experiences with its vertical launch New Shepard rocket.

Mike Suffredini, CEO of Axiom, co-founded the company in 2016 after spending 10 years as head of NASA’s ISS program. Already, the company is building its own modules called “Axiom Station” designed to attach to the ISS, providing room for science experiments and more tourists. Axis-1 “is only the first of several Axiom Space crews,” he said in a statement.

López-Alegría, who flew into space four times as a NASA astronaut, said he met Connor, Pathy, and Stibbe on several occasions at SpaceX headquarters in California and Florida during the Crew-1 mission. from SpaceX last year. He will be in charge of training them in person from a few months before the flight.

“They are very individual, but they all have a very common thread, and that is that they really want this mission to be successful which paves the way for future private astronaut missions,” López-Alegría said. “It’s a good crew.”