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A private mission launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Thursday.
Unlike earlier such flights, none of the passengers are wealthy space tourists paying their own way to orbit. Instead, the three crew members are sponsored by their countries – Italy, Sweden and Turkey. The crew member for Turkey is the country’s first astronaut.
The flight, from Houston’s Axiom Space, is part of a new era where nations no longer need to build their own rockets and spacecraft to launch human spaceflight programs. Now they can buy trips just like buying air tickets from a commercial company.
The astronauts were aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After a one-day delay for additional checks of the vehicle, the countdown proceeded smoothly, with the rocket’s engines firing up at 4:49 p.m. Eastern Time.
The spacecraft is expected to reach the space station on Saturday morning.
The private astronaut mission, X-3, is the third mission for Axiom, which is also developing its own space station and building new spacesuits for NASA. It chartered this rocket flight from SpaceX, and is sending paying customers for a two-week stay to the International Space Station starting in 2022. In 2019, NASA opened its portion of the space station to visitors, a reversal from earlier policies. (Russia has hosted a series of space tourists on the International Space Station since 2001.)
For the European Space Agency and its 22 countries, commercial flights like Axiom provide a way to get more Europeans into space and highlight the mix of traditional and commercial space programs.
ESA is currently paying 8.3 percent of the space station’s costs and thus its astronauts get that share of the six-month assignment there. This currently corresponds to only four flights until the space station’s scheduled retirement in 2030.
“We don’t have that many flights, so we can’t give an astronaut to every member state,” said Frank de Winne, head of ESA’s Astronaut Office. “this is impossible.”
But Thursday’s Axiom flight will see Swedish astronaut Marcus Wandt reach the International Space Station on a commercial flight.
“If Acxiom didn’t have this option available, it wouldn’t be happening now,” Mr. Wandt said during a news conference last week.
Mr Wandt, a fighter and test pilot, applied to ESA a few years ago to become an astronaut. Out of 22,500 applicants, he made it to the final round of selection, but was not one of the five chosen by ESA as new full-time astronauts.
However, he was named a “reserve” astronaut. These are unpaid positions, but reserve astronauts are eligible for training and space missions if a commercial opportunity arises and their country is willing to pay for the ticket.
“That’s why we created the Reserve Corps,” Mr De Winne said.
The X-3 crew members are not the first government astronauts to go into orbit this way.
The United Arab Emirates in 2019 purchased a flight on a Russian Soyuz rocket for one of its astronauts, Hazza Al-Mansouri, for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station. Axiom Space arranged a six-month stay on the space station for the second Emirati astronaut, Sultan Alnedi, in 2023. Saudi Arabia also sent two astronauts to the International Space Station on Axiom’s last flight last year.
In March, Swedish officials heard that Axiom had an empty seat on this private astronaut mission. “If we could make a quick decision, it was a possibility for us to do it,” said Anna Rathsman, director general of the Swedish National Space Agency.
“We realized that an opportunity like this, it doesn’t come around often,” said Mats Persson, Swedish Minister of Higher Education, Research and Space. “And when we got it, we took it.”
Sweden, with financial contributions from the space agency, the Swedish armed forces and companies like Saab, paid Mr. Wandt about 450 million Swedish krona, or about $43 million, to go into space. That’s less than the $55 million that Axiom initially said in 2018 it would charge for a seat. (Acxiom has now declined to disclose the cost.)
With the agreement, Mr. Wandt was promoted from reserve astronaut to project astronaut – a one-year paid position for this mission. The work he will do on the space station includes an experiment identifying the effects of weightlessness on stem cells and how architectural settings in space affect the physical and mental well-being of astronauts.
Other ESA members have also signed up for future Axiom flights. Similar to Sweden’s arrangement for Mr Wandt, Poland has an astronaut, Sławoj Uznanski, one of ESA’s reserve astronauts, who is in line for a future Axiom flight. The United Kingdom Space Agency has also signed a deal with Axiom to carry its astronauts into orbit.
On this flight, other crew members include Alper Gezervasi, a fighter pilot from the Turkish Air Force, and Walter Viladei, a colonel from the Italian Air Force.
As the first Turkish astronaut, Mr. Gezervasi hopes to serve as an inspiration to future generations in his country.
“This space flight is not the destination of our journey,” he said during the crew’s press conference. “This is just the beginning of our journey.”
The mission’s pilot, Mr Villadei of Italy, has already been in space, but only for a few minutes. He was one of three members of the Italian Air Force who carried out the Virgin Galactic suborbital flight last June and conducted a series of experiments in biomedicine, fluid dynamics and materials science.
Although Italy is also a member of ESA, the trip for Mr Viladei was arranged not by the country’s space agency, but by the Italian Air Force.
The mission commander is Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut and now chief astronaut at Axiom. NASA requires that private astronaut missions be led by a former NASA astronaut.
Other countries have also taken a commercial approach to human spaceflight, and the idea is not new.
More than a decade ago, Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune in real estate, including the budget Suites of America hotel chain, was planning to launch private stations that would serve paying customers, primarily countries, which he called ” will be leased to “sovereign customers”. ,
Mr Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, signed MoUs with countries like the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Australia and the UK.
Due to delays by other aerospace companies in the development of spacecraft that would fly people to space stations and back, Bigelow’s plans never got off the ground.
Still, Michael Gold, who was director of Bigelow Aerospace’s Washington office at the time, said Bigelow’s early efforts helped pave the way for what Axiom is doing now.
Mr. Gold said that at that time, a foreign space tourist would have to be accompanied by someone from the U.S. Defense Technology Security Administration to ensure that the tourist did not gain knowledge of any regulated aerospace technologies.
Ultimately, federal officials decided it was unnecessary.
“This is a great example of how the early work we did at Bigelow Aerospace was a pioneer in building the ecosystem that Axiom Space and other companies are leveraging today,” Mr. Gold said. Who is now the Chief Development Officer of Redwire. Space Infrastructure Company.
