Three businessmen and a former astronaut, who left Earth aboard a SpaceX rocket, arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) early Saturday.
Article written by
published
Updating
Reading time : 1 minute.
They were greeted with hugs and camera flashes. The first all-private space mission, made up of three businessmen and a former astronaut who took off on a SpaceX rocket, arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) early Saturday, April 9. They stay there for a little over a week.
All smiles, often thumbs up in their black and blue uniforms, the commander of the Ax-1 mission, the American-Spanish Michael Lopez-Alegria, the Canadian Mark Pathy, the American Larry Connor and the Israeli Eytan Stibbe came to the emerged one after another from SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
Michael Lopez-Alegria, a 63-year-old former NASA astronaut, is now an employee of the Axiom company that organized the trip. The other three crew members each paid tens of millions of dollars for the experiment. The pilot role was taken by Larry Connor, the head of a real estate company. Mark Pathy is the boss of an investment company and ex-pilot Eytan Stibbe is the co-founder of an investment fund.
Novices have already visited the space station, especially in the 2000s. Last year, Russia sent a film crew, then a Japanese billionaire, there. But these flew aboard Soyuz missiles, accompanied by cosmonauts.
The four men on this first completely private mission have a busy schedule, with some 25 experiments in the fields of aging, heart health and even stem cells.
Axiom Space has agreed on a total of four missions with SpaceX, and NASA has already formally approved the principle of a second, Ax-2. For Axiom Space, this is a first step towards an ambitious goal: building its own space station.
