The launch is hailed by the US space agency (NASA) and other industry players as a turning point in the expansion of commercial spaceflight, referred to by experts as the low-Earth orbit economy, or LEO economy for short.
Weather permitting, the four-man Axiom mission will lift off Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket owned by SpaceX mogul Elon Musk.
The launch was originally scheduled for Wednesday. An Axiom spokesman said today that the delay will give SpaceX more time to complete pre-launch checks. If all goes well, the quartet of astronauts, led by veteran NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Allegria, is expected to arrive at the ISS 28 hours later, when SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule will dock with the International Space Station about 400 kilometers away from Earth.
The 63-year-old Lopez-Alegria is the Spanish-born mission commander and vice president of Axiom , responsible for business development. He will be joined by American businessman Larry Connor, Israeli pilot Litan Stebbe and Canadian businessman Mark Patti.
[/P]Stebbe will become the second Israeli to go into space, after Nlan Ramon who was killed in 2003 (along with six NASA astronauts) in the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy.
The crew of the Ax-1 mission may seem to have a lot in common with the wealthy space travelers who paid handsomely to fly with Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic recently, but Axiom's leaders stress that their mission is more meaningful. We are not space tourists, Lopez-Allegria said at a press conference, adding that the Axiom team has trained intensively with both NASA and SpaceX and will conduct meaningful biomedical research during their stay on the International Space Station.
Axion's co-founder and executive director, Cam Gafarian, in an interview with Reuters likened the current era of change in space travel to the early days of the internet and said that we haven't even imagined all the possibilities and opportunities that lie ahead.
The Ax-1 team will carry to the International Space Station equipment and supplies for 26 science and technology experiments it aspires to conduct during its stay on the ISS.
Source: CNA
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