After sending the world’s first all-civilian space tourism crew into low Earth orbit for a few days, now a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has successfully delivered the world’s first all-civilian space private mission to the International Space Station.
The four crew members will stay on the space station as “guests” for eight days and conduct a total of 25 private scientific experiments.
At 11:17 a.m. ET on April 8, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center to perform Axiom Space’s Ax-1 (Axiom-1) private mission, sitting on the manned Dragon spacecraft Endeavour. ) The four crew members are all non-governmental astronauts, representing the world’s first all-civilian team to take a probe to the space station to carry out experiments.
At about 8:29 a.m. EST on April 9, the Endeavour Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the space station (about 45 minutes later than originally planned), former NASA astronaut and mission commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, American Real Estate Investor Larry Connor, Canadian investor Mark Pathy, former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe and other 4 people are preparing to carry out an 8-day scientific experiment (mostly related to biomedicine), living with 7 other government agency astronauts.
The Dragon spacecraft seat ticket is expected to be $55 million per person, and in order to use the space station facilities, Axiom Space also pays NASA an undisclosed sum, such as $11,250 per person per night to use the space station toilet.
But the Ax-1 mission is a “guest” after all, and if the toilet happens to break down, they don’t have to help fix it.
As for the four civilian crew members, they will sleep in different places on the space station: two in the Columbus experiment module, one in the Endeavour Dragon spacecraft, and one in the airlock. After the mission, the four will return to Earth in the Dragon spacecraft and splash down somewhere off the coast of Florida.
On April 21, the SpaceX Freedom Dragon spacecraft is about to perform the manned 4 mission, sending three NASA astronauts and one ESA astronaut to the International Space Station and then bringing back another crew.
