The first fully privately organized flight to the International Space Station (ISS) took off from Kennedy Space Center in the US state of Florida. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral on Friday carrying three contractors and a former NASA astronaut. The four men are scheduled to arrive at the ISS on Saturday aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule and remain on the space station for eight days.
The flight is organized by the US space company Axiom Space. The three paying crew members of the Ax-1 mission are American real estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian businessman Mark Pathy and Israeli businessman and former fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe. According to media reports, they reportedly paid 55 million dollars each (50 million euros) for the flight. The commander is former American-Spanish NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría.
The men must perform about 25 experiments aboard the space station. They therefore reject the term “space tourists” for themselves. Instead, Larry Connor spoke of “private astronauts.”
In the past, private individuals have repeatedly visited the ISS. Last year, a Russian film crew flew in to film the space station, as did Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. However, they use Soyuz rockets from the Russian space agency Roskosmos.
For Friday’s flight, Axiom Space partnered with Tesla founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The two companies agreed on a total of four missions. The US space agency NASA has already approved the second Ax-2 mission.
Axiom Space sees the missions as the first steps towards a greater goal: building a private space station. According to the company, the first module is scheduled to go into space in 2024. It will initially dock as a new segment on the ISS. When the ISS is decommissioned at the end of the decade, it will remain in space.
In the long term, NASA wants to leave so-called near-Earth orbit to the private sector, which must operate space stations there for research and business purposes. NASA itself wants to focus on space exploration and travel to the moon and Mars.