Later this week, Axiom-1 will be the first private, commercial flight to the International Space Station. It is another first in the goal of sending humans into space, and moreso, ordinary paying customers.
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They will not be the first space tourists to the International Space Station. Dennis Tito in 2001, and seven subsequent others, paid the Russians $20 - $35 million each to be a tourist on the Russian missions.
We also saw last year the great race for private companies to start flying people into space. Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic raced to beat Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to go up in July. Since that flight, after being temporarily grounded by the US's Federal Aviation Administration, they've been working on upgrading and building more planes.
Meanwhile, not only has Blue Origin taken Jeff Bezos into space, but they had two other flights last year, including flying William Shatner. They had their fourth flight, and first of the year, on Friday (Australia time), including a full load of 6 passengers - and not one of them was a celebrity, just "normal" paying customers.
While they do not disclose how much they pay, the celebrities fly for free. The flight was originally going to have US comedian Pete Davidson who didn't go up due to a schedule change of the flight.
What makes Axiom-1 different from those is both where they are going, for how long, and who is doing it.
Axiom Space is a company aimed at private astronaut missions. Instead of building rockets, they are focused on doing the actual space activities. Some of that, like this mission, will be for tourists to go into space. However, they will still do space activities.
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Axiom also wants to have private astronauts. instead of being part of a nation, their astronauts would be part of a company. The company is also led by former NASA astronauts, and even a former head of NASA is part of Axiom space.
Axiom has plans for a private space station in a few years. They are also working with the Discovery Channel on a TV show - "Who Wants To Be an Astronaut?".
As you can probably guess, the winner will get to be an astronaut and go up on a future Axiom mission.
For this week, the mission will be commanded by Michael Lopez-Alegra, who is a retired NASA astronaut, having already completed four space missions with NASA already. The other passengers are private, paying customers, including the pilot. They are paying US $55 million each, a bit more than what the Russians charged.
They will spend 10 days in space, with eight of those days on the International Space Station. That is a lot longer than the eight minutes people on Blue Origin spend, or the three days the four private people had on SpaceX's Inspiration-4 mission.
Originally, Tom Cruise was looking at going on this mission to film part of a movie in space. However, he is now scheduled for a later one, when his movie studio is ready.
Just as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic ignited the race to take humans into space, we are now starting on the era of private astronauts.
As long as you have tens of millions of dollars.
- Brad Tucker is an astrophysicist and cosmologist at Mount Stromlo Observatory, and the National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at ANU
