After months of training, the four crew members of the first fully private mission to the International Space Station (ISS) are ready to take off aboard a SpaceX rocket on the 30th of this month.
The mission, called Ax-1, will last ten days, eight of which will be aboard the station. The launch will take place in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
On board will be three businessmen from the United States, Canada and Israel, who paid tens of millions of dollars each. There will only be one experienced astronaut, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former member of NASA, who has been on the ISS.
“We are not space tourists”, explained Lopez-Alegria at a press conference on Monday (28). “It’s not a vacation.”
“They will carry out important research,” said Michael Suffredini, head of the company Axiom Space, which organized the trip. They will carry out 26 scientific experiments, some of them on stem cells or heart health, in collaboration with research centers on Earth.
Private astronauts plan research with real impact, according to Robyn Gatens, director of the ISS. The crew will also take the opportunity to bring NASA experiments back to Earth, which she says will be very useful as the air lab is overcrowded.
The crew, who trained with NASA in Houston and SpaceX in California, will operate aboard the North American segment of the station.
Axiom Space has reached an agreement for a total of four missions with SpaceX, and NASA, which charges for the stay, has formally approved the start of a second, Ax-2.
For Axiom Space, this is a first step towards an ambitious goal: building its own space station. “These missions give us the opportunity to test on a smaller scale,” Suffredini said.
The move towards privatization of low orbit is encouraged by NASA, which no longer wants to manage the operation of a station, but rather hire the services of private structures, to focus on distant exploration.
In 2021, Russia also sent newcomers to the ISS: a film crew to shoot a movie, plus a Japanese billionaire and his assistant.
