Tourists who wish to journey to the International Space Station must be accompanied by experienced space travel experts to avoid complications or safety concerns.
NASA will require private citizens who are seeking to travel to space to be led by former astronauts as the missions’ leaders to provide guidance from the pre-flight preparation through the travel, according to the agency. The guidelines aim to reduce the risk to tourists and increase their safety.
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The guidelines would also establish a separate code of conduct private citizens must follow while conducting space travel and requirements for packing cargo to ensure a smoother docking process.
The decision comes in response to the first private space mission to the ISS last April after crew members said they did not properly pace themselves and ended up “overly stressing the workload” for the crew, Susan Helms, a member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said in May.
“In essence, the arrival of the PAM personnel seemed to have a larger than expected impact on the daily workload for the professional space station crew,” Helms said about the Ax-1 crew that initiated a mission in April 2021. “There were some opportunity costs in the form of overly stressing the workload of the onboard ISS crewmembers and the mission controllers who support them.”
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The crew also reported they were not prepared for the adjustment to microgravity, something NASA said it hopes to address in future missions. As part of the guidelines, the agency would provide “additional time in private astronauts’ schedules to allow them to adapt better to microgravity,” according to NASA.
The requirements could affect plans for future trips to space, as Axiom, which funded the Ax-1 crew, plans to launch a second private mission to the ISS in 2023 with former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson as its commander. However, the company has indicated it would expand future trips to include four paying customers instead of just three, which would leave no room for an astronaut commander.
