Four new space tourists flew to the International Space Station on Friday. The stay will last eight days.
Last Friday, four space tourists took off for the ISS aboard a Crew Dragon capsule powered by a Falcon 9 rocket. Michael López-Alegría, hired by Axiom Space as a professional astronaut, Eytan Stibbe, a former fighter pilot and Israeli businessman, and two North American businessmen, Larry Connor and Mark Pathy, departed for 10 travel days, 8 of which were aboard the ISS.
We interviewed one of the passengers, Michael López-Alegría, in 2016:
This mission is being conducted by SpaceX on behalf of Axiom Space. The latter wants to create a commercial space station for the tourists of the future in 2024. Axiom Space plans to organize up to two space trips per year. When the ISS reaches retirement, the Axiom complex will be detached and operated as a free-flying commercial space station.
“Thanks to Axiom and NASA’s support, private crew missions will now have unprecedented access to the space station, fueling the commercialization of space and helping usher in a new era of human exploration,” said Gwynne Shotwell, President and Chief Operating Officer of SpaceX, in 2020.
Would the event become commonplace? Far from being the first manned mission (the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, was on the ISS in 2001), this mission, dubbed SpaceX Axiom Space-1, will not be the last. Since the various flights organized by SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic in 2021, space tourism seems to be truly democratizing, while at the same time the threat of global warming is no longer in doubt. Don’t look up.
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