Last night, an Axiom Space mission carrying a private crew blasted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, heading toward the International Space Station. The crew of four, led by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, flew aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and docked with the ISS at about 9:12 a.m. Eastern time this morning. It’s the second time Axiom has ferried paying customers to the ISS. Last year’s inaugural flight was a milestone for space tourism. This time, it’s a glimpse at the future of the space station itself.
The ISS’s years are numbered. NASA has committed to supporting the station through 2030, at which point the agency wants to have the first components of a commercial successor in place. In 2021, the agency assigned contracts to a trio of companies—Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, and Nanoracks—to develop competing designs. NASA awarded a separate contract to Axiom in 2020 to develop a habitable module to attach to the ISS, with up to three modules to follow. The first one is expected to launch in late 2025, and once NASA and its partners decommission and deorbit the ISS, Axiom’s modules will detach and merge with each other, becoming a standalone space station.
But in the interim, private passengers and seasoned space agency astronauts will need to learn how to live and work side by side. Over time, as the number of visitors and modules add up, the interactions between Axiom passengers and traditional astronauts could change, especially once the private customers essentially have their own orbital hotel rooms. “These missions are very important to us at NASA as we try to open up space to a greater cross section of society. We think the economy in low Earth orbit will continue to expand, and some day NASA will just be a participant in that economy, buying services from private industry,” said Ken Bowersox, a NASA associate administrator, at a joint press conference last week with Axiom and SpaceX officials.
Ax-2, as this spaceflight is called, is carrying three paying visitors for an eight-day stay, plus Commander Whitson, Axiom's director of human space flight, who will build on her record as the American who has spent the most time in space—665 days. (Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka holds the global record at 878 days.) The other members of the quartet include American race-car driver and businessman John Shoffner, Royal Saudi Air Force pilot Ali AlQarni, and biomedical researcher Rayyanah Barnawi. AlQarni and Barnawi are the first Saudi Arabians to visit the ISS, and Barnawi is also the first Saudi Arabian woman in space. “I am very honored and happy to be representing all the dreams and hopes of people in Saudi Arabia and all the women back home,” Barnawi said at a press conference with the rest of the crew on May 16.
The Saudi Arabian government is paying for their tickets, and Shoffner is paying for his own. Axiom declined to reveal the exact ticket price for this flight, although the coveted seats for Ax-1 in 2022 cost in the ballpark of $55 million apiece.
Barnawi and AlQarni’s presence onboard Ax-2 will mark a major success for the human spaceflight program of the Saudi Space Commission, which the Saudi government established in December 2018. Saudi Arabia has recently increased its involvement in space activities, including joining the US-led Artemis Accords and launching a handful of telecommunication satellites.
As Axiom gets more spaceflights under its belt, the company has been refining its 150-hour passenger training routine. (Shoffner has been through lengthier training, since he was a backup crew member for Ax-1.) Following Ax-1, Axiom added more practice with the software tools the crew will use on orbit to manage their day-to-day tasks. Their preparations also included training for docking with the ISS—though that process is mostly automatic—learning how to pack and unpack the Dragon, and flying on a parabolic aircraft, which mimics zero gravity, to experience weightlessness.
It’s all part of making the experience as useful and enjoyable as possible while ensuring safety and that the private customers and space agency astronauts don’t get in each other’s way. “We spent a lot of time with the Ax-2 crew, based on lessons learned from Ax-1, talking about what to touch, what not to touch, when to ask questions,” said Derek Hassmann, Axiom’s chief of mission integration and operations, at last week’s briefing. If the Ax-2 passengers aren’t sure about something, they’re supposed to ask Whitson first, and then their ISS astronaut counterparts after that, he said.
Ax-2 is now the third private spaceflight to orbit; the two Axiom flights were preceded in 2021 by SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission, which didn’t dock at the space station but looped the Earth for three days. With more flights from both companies expected later this year, such orbital excursions could become routine. “It’s an exciting time to see these private astronaut missions. It means we’re entering a phase where this is no longer unique, where it’s becoming a regular part of how we do business in space. I think the regularization of that is an important milestone,” says Alex MacDonald, NASA’s chief economist.
The Ax-2 crew will spend some of their time in space on public outreach events aimed at encouraging art and science students, including doing a couple of live videos. For example, Shoffner will announce the winner of an art and poetry contest that asked contestants to respond to the prompt: “What would it look like if we lived in space?”
The crew carried some 20 science experiments with them, including one that will test the effects of short trips in microgravity on people’s eyes and brains, and another that will test whether the microgravity environment can make it easier to produce induced pluripotent stem cells made from mature human cells drawn from blood or skin. Last year’s Ax-1 crew brought along experiments, too. While little research has been published yet, new findings are expected to be released this summer, according to Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City who’s involved in that research.
Ax-2 offers a new opportunity for customers to dispatch their own payloads to the space station, too. These include a Golden Record–inspired 6-inch disk of audio messages of peace and hope in many languages, called Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space, or HUMANS. (Shoffner will play some of the audio off of an iPhone while onboard.) The Gravity Loading Countermeasure Skinsuit project also sent a skintight suit to be worn by one of the Ax-2 crew. It’s intended to limit bone and muscle loss in microgravity—something that might be used one day on long voyages to Mars.
“The Axiom-2 flight is giving us a very important prototype of what the payloads, the research, and the distribution of the crew might look like for future space station development. Yes, private astronauts are going up for an experience, but they’re also deeply embedded in the research,” says Ariel Ekblaw, founder and director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, who is involved with both of these projects.
While Axiom will be the first company to attach a private module to the ISS, it’s not the only one working on new space station concepts. One or more of NASA-funded designs by Northrop Grumman, Blue Origin, and Nanoracks could launch later this decade as the station’s successor. And Los Angeles–based startup Vast Space and SpaceX announced on May 10 that they intend to launch a private space station called Haven-1 in late 2025.
As commercial outposts eventually replace the government-operated ISS, some aspects of life in low Earth orbit will surely change, but MacDonald is heartened by the fact that one thing still seems true: Space travel remains a global endeavor. “It’s wonderful and encouraging that the internationalism that the ISS itself was built with, and through which it’s still operated, is also reflected in these private astronaut missions,” he says.
