Presented this Tuesday, January 26, the first private crew of the International Space Station (ISS) consists of three men. All paid $55 million for their ticket. The trip, organized by Axiom Space, will take place aboard a SpaceX capsule.
To date, only a dozen individuals have ever had the chance to live on the International Space Station (ISS) as tourists. All flew in Soyuz capsules. The last to have stayed there (for about ten days) was the Canadian Guy Laliberté, in 2009. Nevertheless, the private sector promises to soon offer the same type of services.
A few years ago, the company Axiom Space, headed by Mike Suffredini (a former NASA employee), notably entered into a contract with SpaceX to send four people to the ISS aboard a Crew Dragon capsule in 2021 . We now know a little more, starting with the crew presented this Tuesday.
Axiom's first clients will therefore be Larry Connor, an entrepreneur from Dayton (Ohio), Canadian financier Mark Pathy and Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe. Note that the latter was a close friend of the first Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, killed in the Columbia space shuttle accident in 2003.
These three will also be accompanied by Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut now working for Axiom Space. All paid their ticket approximately 55 million dollars . We do not yet know the launch date, but we do know that the crew will remain about eight days on board the station , before returning to land at sea off Cape Canaveral (Florida).
Each of these new private astronauts has already spent several medical tests and all will benefit from fifteen weeks of training . Note that the first of them, Larry Connor, is 70 years old. He will thus become the second oldest person to fly in space after astronaut John Glenn (77 years old in 1998).
If all goes as planned, Axiom will organize up to two private missions per year to the space station . At the same time, the company is also working on the construction of its own residential compartments which should be integrated into the ISS from 2024, before detaching from it a few years later to transform into a real completely autonomous private space outpost.
Finally, in addition to the partnership between Axiom and SpaceX mentioned above, let's remember that there is also talk of the company Space Adventures collaborating again with RSC Energia, the most important company Russian space sector. As part of this contract, a client could perform a spacewalk. That would be a first.
