Axiom Space launched a high-stakes mission Friday, sending three paying customers to the International Space Station as Houston seeks to anchor a new era of human spaceflight.
The crew, tucked inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 10:17 a.m. CDT. They’re scheduled to reach the space station Saturday morning and spend eight days there.
American Larry Connor, 72, Canadian Mark Pathy, 52, and Israeli Eytan Stibbe, 64, are not the first people to buy tickets to the International Space Station. But their privately funded mission — each reportedly paying tens of millions of dollars — is notable because it’s the first all-private crew to visit the station. Previous missions have been shepherded by a government-paid astronaut. The Axiom Space commander, Michael López-Alegría, 63, is an Axiom employee and former NASA astronaut.
There’s a lot riding on this mission. The crew must show that private astronauts aren’t a nuisance to International Space Station operations. Houston-based Axiom Space must learn to conduct human spaceflight missions before launching its own commercial space station. And Houston must show that it can continue supporting human spaceflight as NASA trusts companies to own and operate the hardware that protect people in space.
“The space industry, as a whole, is currently in a massive switch from completely government to commercial,” said Meagan Crawford, co-founder of Houston-based venture capital firm SpaceFund. “And in order for Houston to maintain its moniker of Space City, we’ve really got to cultivate that startup environment here.”
Space City
Houston has a long and storied history in human spaceflight. When astronauts called home from the Apollo spacecraft, space shuttle and International Space Station, they spoke to folks at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
But lately, it’s not just NASA sending people into space. The Axiom Space mission, Ax-1, is the sixth human spaceflight mission launched by Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX.
For missions to the ISS, astronauts train on the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule in California and learn the International Space Station systems in Houston. Spacewalks are practiced in Houston in a giant swimming pool called the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory.
But as companies begin to own and operate the systems used to launch people into space, lower them onto the moon and shelter them in low-Earth orbit, their facilities may or may not be located in Houston.
“Houston has the possibility of becoming a place where a lot of people who know how to ‘do space’ live and want to start their own businesses,” said John Logsdon, founder of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute.
NASA is willing to share its facilities and expertise in operations, medicine, food and spacesuits, said Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche.
“We’re in a renaissance,” Wyche said. “In order for us to explore — go onto the moon, go onto Mars — it’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take government, it’s going to take commercial industry and it’s going to take the international community.
“I want Houston to continue to be the human spaceflight hub. For the world,” she said.
The Ax-1 mission
The Ax-1 mission is a first step toward that vision.
Axiom Space, founded in 2016, contracted the crew’s ride into space, oversaw their training, planned their mission and helped prepare them to conduct research. While the crew is in space, Axiom is in charge of their timeline and mission operations. NASA, however, has ultimate authority over anything on and immediately around the space station.
The crew members, depending on their position, received 750 hours to more than 1,000 hours in training. They underwent physical and psychological examinations. They studied ISS power and communications systems. They had to pass a three-hour oral exam on what to do in emergency situations.
“We literally covered the gamut of all the critical and important components associated with the ISS and its operations,” Connor said. “This was serious, consuming, rigorous training.”
Most of their time in Houston was spent within the Johnson Space Center. But Stibbe did make friends at the Consulate General of Israel to the Southwest, which paid for a mural at 1110 Paige Street.
The mural, painted by Israeli-Houstonian artist Anat Ronen, uses a vintage sci-fi style to depict scenes of space history, future and fiction. It includes the Ax-1 mission patch, a space shuttle launch and former Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon giving the “Star Trek” Vulcan salute.
Stibbe is the second Israeli to go into space. Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, was among the seven people who died in 2003 when Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry.
When Stibbe goes into space, he will take copies of pages from Ramon’s journal that survived the shuttle disaster. He will also take a song written by Ramon’s son and a painting by Ramon’s daughter of pages falling from the sky.
He will also continue an experiment Ramon started 19 years ago — observing thunderstorms from above.
That’s just one of the more than 25 experiments the crew will conduct in space. Their research includes self-assembling technology for satellites and future space habitats, cancer stem cells, air purification and turning cow cells into steaks.
With such a workload (and many hours of training), Connor did not want to be called a space tourist.
Axiom Space prefers the term private astronaut. López-Alegría, who was part of three space shuttle missions and one Russian Soyuz mission, said he wanted the crew to feel they got their planned work done, “but most of all that they had a wonderful experience.”
The path to growth
Connor, the founder and managing partner of real estate investment firm The Connor Group, did not say how much he paid to access space. But he said of the expense: “If you look at our non-for-profit, which is really focused on under-resourced kids, I’m going to contribute 10 times more than I’m paying on this mission in the next five to seven years.”
Pathy is the chairman and CEO of the investment and financing company MAVRIK, which is focused on innovation and social impact. Stibbe founded the Vital Capital impact investment fund after more than four decades as a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force. Stibbe’s personal mission, called Rakia, is in collaboration with the Ramon Foundation, the Israel Space Agency, the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology and the Ministry of Education.
Visiting the space station is not plausible for the masses, but Crawford said there are plenty of people and emerging space countries willing to pay the tens of millions of dollars. It will be an important revenue stream as Axiom works to build its commercial space station, with the first module slated to launch in late 2024.
“We see the need and demand for commercial space stations in the coming decade, two decades,” she said. “But investors are also looking for near-term returns.”
SpaceFund is an investor in Axiom.
Houston will have to be aggressive if it wants to maintain its lead in human spaceflight training and support. It doesn’t have a natural monopoly like Florida, which is ideally situated for launches, said Greg Autry, a clinical professor of space leadership, policy and business for Arizona State University.
Businesses like Axiom Space, with more than 400 employees, are already attracting talent to the Houston area, said Axiom co-founder Kam Ghaffarian. Creating incentives to attract outside companies and encouraging Johnson Space Center engineers to become entrepreneurs would also benefit the region, Crawford said.
The Houston Spaceport is likewise working to attract a cluster of aerospace companies that can invent, develop and manufacture space technologies. Axiom Space will be an anchor tenant, and it will build its own astronaut training facilities.
It’s hoped that commercial space stations — with their potential for large-scale manufacturing and late-stage pharmaceutical trials — could be a boon for the region. Webster-based Nanoracks is also working on a commercial station.
But it will be important that Axiom demonstrates the profitability of its station and the potential for customers to make money, said George W.S. Abbey, a former director of the Johnson Space Center and senior fellow in space policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini agreed: “Our objective is to make money over the life of the company, or we’re not much of a company.”
He likens commercial space stations to the early days of the internet, where people kept finding new and innovative uses.
“When you start thinking about the applications of microgravity and the role it can play in almost every industry,” Suffredini said during a news conference, “it is really way beyond what we can imagine today.”
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