The first all-private astronaut team is ready to leave the space station and fly back to Earth.
The first all-private astronaut team sent to the International Space Station (ISS) was getting ready to leave the space station on Sunday, ending a two-week science mission that was seen as a major step for commercial spaceflight.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying the four-man team from Houston-based startup company Axiom Space was scheduled to leave the ISS at about 9 p.m. EDT (0100 GMT Monday) and begin a 16-hour descent back to Earth.
A live NASA Webcast showed that they were inside the Axiom capsule with the hatch to the space station closed around 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT), before they began the final steps of uncoupling.
If everything goes well, the Dragon capsule, which is called Endeavour, will fall into the Atlantic off the coast of Florida on Monday at about 1 p.m. EDT. This is when the capsule will land (1700 GMT).
The flight home was pushed back a few days because of bad weather at the splashdown zone. This meant that the Axiom crew’s stay in orbit went on for a long time longer than it was supposed to.
Axiom’s vice president for business development is Michael Lopez-Alegria, 63, and he is from Spain. The team was made up of people from all over the world. Larry Connor, a 72-year-old technology entrepreneur and aerobatics pilot from Ohio, was his second-in-command. He was designated as the mission pilot.
Eytan Stibbe, 64, a Canadian businessman and philanthropist, and Mark Pathy, 52, also a Canadian businessman and philanthropist, were also on the Ax-1 crew. They were both mission specialists.
For two weeks, they lived with seven people who work for the government on the space station, including three American astronauts and three Russian cosmonauts. They were launched on April 8 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
The Axiom quartet became the first all-commercial group of astronauts to be sent to the space station. They brought with them equipment for two dozen science experiments, biomedical research, and technology demonstrations.
Axiom NASA and SpaceX have called the mission a “watershed moment” in the growth of private space-based commerce, dubbed the “low-Earth orbit economy” or “LEO economy” by industry insiders.
This is the sixth human space flight SpaceX has made in nearly two years. It comes after four NASA astronaut missions to the ISS and the Inspiration 4 flight in September that sent an all-civilian crew into Earth orbit for the first time, but not to the ISS.
There will be three more Axiom astronaut missions flown by SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Tesla Inc. electric car company CEO Elon Musk. They will be flown over the next two years. The cost of going on these trips hasn’t changed.
An investment firm called Republic Capital has stakes in both Axiom and SpaceX. Mo Islam, head of research for the company, says that Axiom charges customers $50 million to $60 million per seat, which is a lot of money.
It was also chosen by NASA in 2020 to build a new commercial space station that will join the space station, which has been run by a US-Russian-led group of 15 countries for more than 20 years. Planned: The Axiom segment is supposed to be able to take over the ISS when the rest of the station is retired around 2030.
