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.