NASA hails first ever private astronaut mission to International Space Station
The International Space Station (ISS) is set to become busier than usual this week when its crew welcomes aboard four new colleagues from Houston-based startup Axiom Space, the first all-private astronaut team ever flown to the orbiting outpost. The launch is being hailed by the company, NASA and other industry players as a turning point in the latest expansion of commercial space ventures collectively referred to by insiders as the low-Earth orbit economy, or "LEO economy" for short.
Weather permitting, Axiom's four-man team was due to lift off on Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, riding atop a Falcon 9 rocket furnished and flown by Elon Musk's commercial space launch venture SpaceX.
If all goes smoothly, the quartet led by retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria will arrive at the space station 28 hours later as their SpaceX-supplied Crew Dragon capsule docks at ISS some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
Lopez-Alegria, 63, is the Spanish-born mission commander and Axiom's vice president of business development. He is set to be joined by Larry Connor, a real estate and technology entrepreneur and aerobatics aviator from Ohio designated as the mission pilot. Connor is in his 70s but the company did not provide his precise age.
Rounding out the Ax-1 team are investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, 64, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, 52, both serving as mission specialists. Stibbe is set to become the second Israeli in space, after Ilan Ramon, who perished with six NASA crewmates in the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster.
The Ax-1 crew may appear to have a lot in common with many of the wealthy passengers taking suborbital rides lately aboard the
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