Three businessmen and a former astronaut took off on a SpaceX rocket on Friday for the first fully private mission to the International Space Station, where they will stay for just over a week.
Liftoff took place at 11:17 a.m. from Kennedy Space Center under blue skies over Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Novices have already visited the International Space Station (ISS), especially in the 2000s. Last year, Russia sent a film crew there, then a Japanese billionaire. But these were flying on rockets Soyuzaccompanied by cosmonauts.
This time, it was the Axiom Space company that organized the trip, buying the means of transport from SpaceX and paying NASA for the use of its station. “We are expanding the terrestrial borders of trade to space,” said Bill Nelson, the head of the American space agency, who attended the take-off. “To say we are happy is an understatement,” Axiom Space CEO Michael Suffredini told a press conference, noting that it was the culmination of six years of work with NASA and SpaceX. The mission commander, named Axe-1, is the American-Spanish Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut now employed by Axiom. He’s been to the ISS before. The other three crew members paid tens of millions of dollars each for the experiment. The role of pilot is occupied by the American Larry Connor, at the head of a real estate company.
Also on board: Canadian Mark Pathy, owner of an investment company, and ex-pilot Eytan Stibbe, co-founder of an investment fund. No woman had applied for this first mission, said the boss of Axiom Space.
The four men have a full program, with 25 experiments, on aging, heart health and even stem cells.
“The experiments I take up there, which come from Canadian universities and research organizations, probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity to be tested in space” without this mission, argued Mark Pathy. For this reason, among others, the members ofAxe-1 refuse to be called space tourists. “I think it’s important to differentiate space tourists from private astronauts,” said Larry Connor. The former “spend 10 to 15 hours training, 5 to 10 minutes in space. […] We spent between 750 and over 1000 hours training. He and Michael López-Alegría were trained in SpaceX’s capsule system, Dragon.
The capsule Dragon is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Saturday around 7:45 a.m. This is only the sixth time SpaceX has flown humans (the fifth to the ISS). The first flight took place less than two years ago.