The International Space Station (ISS) will be extra busy than normal this week when four new astronauts from Houston-based company Axiom Space join the crew together with Space X, making it the first all-private astronaut team to fly to the space station.
The launch has been lauded by the business, NASA, and other industry players as a pivotal point in the next wave of commercial space initiatives known as the low-Earth orbit economy, or simply "LEO economy."
If the weather allows, Axiom's four-person crew will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday at the earliest, aboard a Falcon 9 rocket provided and operated by Elon Musk's commercial space launch company SpaceX.
The launch was supposed to happen on Wednesday. The delay, according to an Axiom representative, will give SpaceX extra time to finish pre-launch processing procedures.
If everything goes according to plan, the quartet, commanded by retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, will dock at the International Space Station (ISS) some 400 kilometers above Earth in about 28 hours.
Lopez-Alegria, 63, is Axiom's vice chairman of business development and a Spanish-born expedition commander.
Larry Connor, an Ohio-based real estate and technology businessman and aerobatics pilot, will serve as the mission's pilot. Connor is in his 70s; the firm didn't say his exact age.
Eytan Stibbe, 64, an investor and retired Israeli fighter pilot, and Mark Pathy, 52, a Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist, complete the Ax-1 crew as mission specialists.
Stibbe will be the second Israeli in space, following Ilan Ramon, who died along with six NASA crew members in the Columbia accident in 2003.
Many of the rich tourists taking suborbital journeys recently aboard billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson's Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic firms may seem to have a lot in common with the Ax-1 crew.
Axiom executives, on the other hand, stated their purpose is more serious.
"We are not space tourists," Lopez-Alegria remarked during a recent press conference, stressing that the Axiom team has received significant astronaut training from both NASA and SpaceX and would conduct meaningful biomedical experiments.
Before leaving orbit and returning to Earth 10 days after launch, the so-called Ax-1 team will be carrying supplies and equipment for 26 science and technological investigations.
According to company leaders, these include studies on cardiac stem cells, brain health, aging, and cancer, as well as a technology demonstration to make optics via the surface tension of fluids in microgravity.
