A Texas-based space company is sending the first all-private astronaut crew to the International Space Station on Friday.
Four astronauts from Axiom Space in Houston will take off from NASA‘s Kennedy Space Center in Florida “riding atop a Falcon 9 rocket furnished and flown by Elon Musk’s commercial space launch venture SpaceX,” according to Reuters. The plan is for the group to conduct science and technology experiments, and they will return to Earth after 10 days.
“We are not space tourists,” said former NASA astronaut and Axiom employee Michael Lopez-Alegria, who noted that the group has gone through astronaut training with NASA and SpaceX. Lopez-Alegria will be leading the team on the journey. The launch was previously set to happen on Wednesday but got bumped back to the end of the week.
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The other astronauts include 64-year-old Eytan Stibbe, a former Israeli fighter pilot, Larry Connor, an Ohio real estate and technology businessman, and 52-year-old Mark Pathy, a Canadian businessman.
Axiom executives said the studies the crew plans to conduct include those concerning research on brain health, cardiac stem cells, cancer, and aging, according to the report.
“It is the beginning of many beginnings for commercializing low-Earth orbit,” Kam Ghaffarian, the co-founder and executive chairman of Axiom, told the outlet. “We’re like in the early days of the internet, and we haven’t even imagined all the possibilities, all the capabilities, that we’re going to be providing in space.”
Falcon 9 and Dragon roll out to the launch pad at 39A for @Axiom_Space’s Ax-1 mission pic.twitter.com/7LWHH4bWLn
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 5, 2022
Axiom says it has created a contract with SpaceX to conduct three more missions into space over the next two years.
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NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei returned to Earth last week after completing the longest mission in space alongside two Russian astronauts. Vande Hei set records when he remained in space for 355 days. The previous record was held by Scott Kelly in 2016 after spending 340 days in space.
