Axiom Space Space Mission: Private Excursion to the ISS

There have often been individual guests on the ISS space station, but now a whole private crew is coming: three entrepreneurs and an ex-NASA astronaut travel into space for a week in a SpaceX capsule.

“This is our first mission of hundreds to come,” says Michael Suffradini. He is the boss of the Texan space company Axiom Space, and the man thinks in decades. This first mission is a charter flight to the International Space Station, flown on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. That has actually never happened before, not a single guest, but a purely paid flight to the ISS with a one-week stay.

Three businessmen and an astronaut in space

“We’re the first and I think we have a responsibility here,” said American entrepreneur Larry Connors. He is one of the three paying passengers. The other two are from Canada and Israel. Reportedly, each of them paid $50 million for the trip to the space station. Former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria is your pilot and tour guide. And yet Michael Suffradini doesn’t want to call it a “tourist flight”. Because you don’t just want to enjoy the stunning view, you want to do experiments.

A trip and a few experiments

“We work with many research institutions around the world and do more than 25 experiments,” he says. These include those on the effect of space on the body, including cancer research and cell aging. And NASA says the flight is convenient for them, too.

“They’re bringing back two of our chest freezers that have important frozen samples in them,” says Dana Weigel, NASA vice manager for the space station. She also points out that despite all the enthusiasm for the visit, the focus is on safety and work on the space station. Because so much is happening at the same time on the space station and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the flight had to be postponed by a few days.

Cooperation with Axiom

But working with Axiom and other new space companies has important strategic implications, says Angela Hart, NASA’s commercial development officer for near-Earth spaceflight. “This mission is an important milestone in NASA’s goal of building a resilient economy in near-Earth space.” Axiom will play an important role in this. The company’s goal is to operate its own space station when the ISS is one day abandoned. But she is already building commercial modules that will be coupled to the existing space station.

According to Suffradini, the first module will be sent into space in a good two years. This will be a mixture of a hotel and workspaces for researchers. Everything is set up so that you fly there in a space capsule, bring your laptop or other device with you and connect it like on earth – with normal sockets and the Internet.