Four new space tourists flew to the International Space Station on Friday. The stay should last eight days.
Last Friday, four space tourists took off aboard a Crew Dragon capsule powered by a Falcon 9 rocket heading for the ISS. Michael López-Alegría hired by Axiom Space as a professional astronaut, Eytan Stibbe, a former fighter pilot and Israeli businessman, and two North American businessmen, Larry Connor and Mark Pathy, took off for 10 days of travel including 8 spent on board the ISS.
We interviewed one of the passengers, Michael López-Alegría, in 2016:
This mission is operated by SpaceX on behalf of Axiom Space. The latter wishes to create a commercial space station in 2024 for the tourists of the future. Axiom Space plans to organize up to two space trips per year. When the ISS reaches its retirement date, the Axiom complex will detach and operate as a free-flying commercial space station.
“Now, thanks to Axiom and support from NASA, privately crewed missions will have unprecedented access to the space station, furthering the commercialization of space and helping usher in a new era of human exploration,” said Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, in 2020.
Would the event become commonplace? Far from being the first manned mission (the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, stayed on the ISS in 2001), this mission named SpaceX Axiom Space-1 will not be the last. Since the various flights organized by SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic in 2021, space tourism seems to be truly democratizing, when, at the same time, the threat of global warming is no longer in doubt. Don’t look up.
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