Three businessmen who paid tens of millions of dollars for the flight are accompanied by a former NASA astronaut, now an employee of the American company Axiom Space, who is organizing the trip.
Article written by
Published
Update
Reading time : 1 min.
Three businessmen and a former NASA astronaut took off on Friday, April 8, aboard a SpaceX rocket for the first entirely private mission to the International Space Station, where they will stay a little over a week.
Liftoff took place at 11:17 a.m. local time (3:17 p.m. GMT) from Kennedy Space Center under blue skies in 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 flew aboard Soyuz rockets, accompanied by cosmonauts.
This time, it was the Axiom Space company which organized the trip, in collaboration with SpaceX and NASA, paid for the use of its station. The commander of the mission, named Ax-1, is the American-Spanish Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former astronaut of the American space agency, who has already visited the ISS.
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. The latter is the second Israeli astronaut in history, after Ilan Ramon, who died in 2003 in the explosion of the American space shuttle Columbia, on his return from the ISS.