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, Axiom’s four-member team will take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, April 8, aboard a furnished Falcon 9 rocket that will fly Elon Musk’s commercial spacecraft, SpaceX. If all goes well, the quartet led by retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria will reach the space station 28 hours later as the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule lands on the ISS about 400 km above Earth. The so-called Ax-1 team will carry equipment and supplies for 26 science and technology experiments that will be carried out 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.
New era for space missions
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. 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. 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. “It’s the beginning of many principles for the commercialization of the low Earth orbit,” Axiom co-founder and CEO Cam Gafarian told Reuters in an interview. “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.” 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 civilians 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.
