The first fully private mission arrived at the ISS (International Space Station) this Saturday morning (9), with a crew of four members from the company Axiom Space.
NASA called its tripartite partnership with Axiom and SpaceX a key step towards commercializing the so-called “low earth orbit”.
The American space agency will focus, from now on, on more ambitious trips towards the ends of the universe.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon Endeavor capsule docked at 9:29 a.m. ET this Saturday with the ISS and the crew entered the space station nearly two hours later, following its launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday. 8).
At the helm of Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) is NASA astronaut Michael López-AlegrÃa, with dual American and Spanish nationality, who has flown into space four times during his 20-year career and last visited the ISS in 2007. .
Accompanying the astronaut are three passengers who paid for the trip: American real estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian investor and philanthropist Mark Pathy and former Israeli combat pilot, investor and philanthropist Eytan Stibbe.
“We’re here to experiment, but we understand that we have a responsibility that everyone does well” as the first civilian crew, Connor said during the NASA live stream.
The price of the tickets, which include eight days on the space station before an eventual landing in the Atlantic, was 55 million dollars.
The Ax-1 is the first mission with a fully private crew to fly a private spacecraft towards the ISS. Houston-based Axiom pays SpaceX for transportation, and NASA also charges Axiom for use of the space station.
research project
Aboard the ISS, which orbits the Earth at an altitude of 400 kilometers, the quartet will carry out 25 research projects, including a demonstration of MIT’s technology of intelligent mosaics that form a robotic beehive and that self-assemble in space architecture.
Another experiment involves using cancer stem cells to grow mini-tumors and then take advantage of the accelerated aging environment of microgravity to identify biomarkers for the early detection of malignant tumors.
“Our guys don’t go there to float for eight days taking photographs and watching from the dome,” Darek Hassamann, Axiom Space’s director of operations, told one of the journalists at a press conference before the launch.
Eytan Stibbe plans to honor his friend Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, who died in the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, when the spacecraft disintegrated returning from the ISS.
Stibbe brings rescued pages from Ramon’s diary to the station, as well as memories of his children.
The Axiom crew will live and work alongside the station’s regular crew: three Americans and one German on the American side and three Russians on the Russian side.
The company has partnered for a total of four missions with SpaceX and NASA has already initially approved the second, AX-2.
Axiom sees these trips as the first steps towards a greater goal: building its own private space station, the first module of which will be launched in 2024.
The structure will first dock with the ISS before becoming autonomous when the orbital laboratory is decommissioned, which is scheduled for 2030.
