Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise won't be among the four men who will crew the first private commercial space tourism mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in January 2022.
Orbital spaceflight services company Axiom Space based in Texas has revealed the mission that will take Cruise and Doug Liman, who directed Cruise's Sci-Fi blockbuster, Edge of Tomorrow, was delayed by "a year or two" due to unknown reasons. Cruise wants to star in the first Hollywood movie to be shot in space and from the ISS.
Instead, the crew of the historic first commercial space mission to the ISS called "SpaceX Axiom Space-1 (AX-1)" will consist of four men, three of whom will pay $55 million each for the eight-day long mission.
The four pioneering space tourists will fly to the ISS aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft. Axiom has turned over command of this mission to SpaceX.
The world's first four space tourists are former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, the mission commander who now works for Axiom Space, and businessmen Larry Connor from the United States, Mark Pathy from Canada and Eytan Stibbe from Israel.
Connor is managing partner of The Connor Group, a real estate investment firm in Ohio. Connor, who is now 70, will become the second-oldest person to fly in space after John Glenn.
Pathy is the CEO of Mavrik, a privately owned Canadian investment company and chairman of Stingray Group, a media and technology company.
Stibbe, a former fighter pilot of the Israeli Air Force, is the founding partner of Vital Capital, an "impact investment" fund.
For the AX-1 mission, Pathy and Stibbe will be designated mission specialists while Connor will be the pilot. The three space tourists will conduct research and educational activities aboard the ISS.
The maiden space tourism mission is set to launch in January 2022 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 launch vehicle from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
"This is the first private flight to the International Space Station (ISS). It's never been done before," said Axiom CEO Mike Suffredini, a former space station program manager for NASA.
"These guys are all very involved and doing it for kind of the betterment of their communities and countries, and so we couldn't be happier with this makeup of the first crew because of their drive and their interest."
Suffredini noted while López-Alegría is a popular figure in the spaceflight industry, "the other three guys are just people who want to be able to go to space, and we're providing that opportunity."
