The mission, dubbed AX-1, was carried out by Houston, Texas-based startup Axiom Space, which booked rocket rides, provided all necessary training and coordinated flights to the ISS for anyone who could afford it.
The four crew members – Michael Lopez-Allegria, a former NASA astronaut who became an Axiom employee who commanded the mission; Israeli businessman Eitan Stibe; Canadian investor Mark Patty; and Ohio-based real estate mogul Larry Connor are due to leave the space station aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Sunday at 8:55 p.m. ET. This is another 24-hour delay from what NASA and Axiom were targeting on Saturday.
Now they plan to spend a day flying freely in orbit before heading back into the atmosphere and parachuting off the coast of Florida around 1pm ET on Monday, according to a tweet from Katie Luders, head of the human space program NASA flights. . The AX-1, which launched on April 8, was initially charged as a 10-day mission, but the delays extended the mission by about a week. During its first 12 days on the space station, the group adhered to a regulated schedule that included about 14 hours a day of activities, including research designed by various research hospitals, universities, technology companies and more. They also spent time holding informational events via video conference with children and students. The delays after that gave them “a little more time to absorb the spectacular views of the blue planet and review the huge amount of work that was successfully completed during the mission,” according to Axiom. It is not clear how much this mission costs. Axiom previously revealed a $ 55 million price on the spot for a 10-day trip to the ISS, but the company declined to comment on financial terms for the particular mission, except to say at a news conference last year that the price was “in the tens of millions.” The mission was made possible by very close coordination between Axiom, SpaceX and NASA, as the ISS is funded and managed by the government, and the space agency has revealed some details about how much it charges for using its 20-year orbital laboratory.
For each mission, the necessary support from NASA astronauts will cost commercial customers $ 5.2 million, and all the support and planning for the mission that NASA provides is another $ 4.8 million. While in space, food alone costs about $ 2,000 a day. Delivering supplies to and from the space station for a commercial crew is another $ 88,000 to $ 164,000 per person per day.
But the extra days spent by the AX-1 crew in space due to the weather will not contribute to their personal total cost, according to a NASA statement.
“Knowing that the goals of the International Space Station mission, such as a recent Russian spacewalk or meteorological challenges, could lead to delayed decoupling, NASA has contracted a strategy that does not require reimbursement for additional delays in detachment,” the statement said. .
This is not the first time paying customers or otherwise non-astronauts have visited the ISS, as Russia has sold seats on its Soyuz spacecraft to various wealthy thrill seekers in recent years.
But the AX-1 was the first mission with a crew entirely of private individuals, without active members of the government corps of astronauts who accompanied them in the capsule during the voyage to and from the ISS. This is also the first time private citizens have traveled to the ISS in a US-made spacecraft.
The mission has launched another round of debates over whether people who pay for space travel should be called “astronauts”, although it should be noted that traveling to the ISS requires much more investment than ever before. and more money than taking a short suborbital trip with a rocket created by companies like Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic. Lopez-Allegria, a veteran of four space trips between 1995 and 2007 during his time at NASA, said: “This mission is very different from what you may have heard in some of the recent ones – especially suborbital – missions. We are not space tourists. I think it has an important role to play in space tourism, but Axiom is not about it. ” The Association of Space Researchers, an international group of astronauts from 38 countries, Lopez-Allegria presented Stib, Patti and Connor with their pins during a welcoming ceremony after the group arrived at the space station.
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