CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida – The first crew on the private space station showed up Tuesday: three men paying $ 55 million to fly a SpaceX rocket.
They will be led by a former NASA astronaut who now works at Axiom Space, the Houston company that organized the trip for next January.
“This is the first private flight on the International Space Station. It had never been done before, ”said Axiom CEO and President Mike Suffredini, former NASA space station program manager.
While mission commander Michael Lopez-Alegria is well known in space circles, “the other three are just people who want to be able to go into space, and we’re offering that opportunity,” Suffredini told The Associated Press.
The first crew will spend eight days at the space station and it will take one or two days to get there aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule after takeoff from Cape Canaveral.
Russia has been tourism off the planet for years, selling attractions on the International Space Station since 2001. Other space companies such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin plan to raise and lower customers who pay for flights only a few minutes. These much more affordable trips, with seats of hundreds of thousands against millions, could begin this year.
Axiom’s first clients include Larry Connor, a real estate and technology entrepreneur from Dayton, Ohio, Canadian financier Mark Pathy, and Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe, a close friend of the first Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died in Columbia space shuttle crash in 2003.
“All of these guys are very involved and they do it to improve their communities and countries, so we couldn’t be happier with this composition of the first crew for their drive and interest,” Suffredini said.
Each of these first paying customers intend to conduct scientific research in orbit, he said, along with educational outreach.
Lopez-Alegria, a former space station resident and leader of the spacewalk, called the group a “pioneer collection.”
Tom Cruise was mentioned last year as a potential crew member; Senior NASA officials confirmed that he was interested in filming a film on the space station. It was not known on Tuesday if Cruise would catch Axiom’s next flight. Suffredini declined to comment.
Each of the private astronauts had to undergo medical tests and will receive 15 weeks of training, according to Suffredini. Connor, 70, will become the second oldest person to fly into space, after John Glenn’s 1998 shuttle flight at the age of 77. He will also serve under the direction of Lopez-Alegria as a capsule pilot.
Axiom plans about two private missions a year at the space station. It is also working to launch its own compartments at the station from 2024. This section would be detached from the station once withdrawn by NASA and international partners and become its own private advantage.