NASA’s Michael López -Alegría was about to fly into orbit with three paid spacecraft – but not the trio of “spaceflyers,” the veteran spaceflyer said.
López-Alegría ordered Axiom Space’s Ax-1 private mission to the International Space Station, which is expected to begin Friday (April 8) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The crew will sail in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, which will board a Falcon 9 rocket. López-Alegría is being paid for this 10-day mission, but her three colleagues are recorded about $ 55 million for information.
However, “I’ll say it’s not a tourist,” López-Alegría told Space.com in an interview last year.
Live updates: Ax-1 is the personal missionary in space
“This place is often called a tourist attraction,” López-Alegría said. But “this is a real job that requires a lot of preparation, and I don’t think it’s going to rest.”
“I think this is amazing, but it’s accomplished because it’s not just the environment you live in, but what personal astronauts accomplish,” he said. Ax-1 “like a NASA missionary to the ISS, I would never compare it to a vacation spacecraft,” he said. “It’s better than that.”
And for the air
In a news conference prior to the April 1 announcement, Peggy Whitson, a former NASA pilot who is now the pilot of the Axiom Space spacecraft, “was well prepared runners;
“We spent many hours in the simulation in technical training and hand training,” López-Alegría added during the news conference.
Ax-1 mission pilot Larry Connor, a stockbroker, added that the pilots had started training less than a year before the flight, and, “on our behalf, used we are anywhere from 750 to more than 1,000 hours of training. ” The group includes director López-Alegría, director Connor and missionary lawyers Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy.
While not necessarily comparable, NASA astronauts must have the minimum degrees of a master’s degree in a STEM field (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and at least two years of experience. bill. And they can train for up to two years to become a “fully qualified astronaut” before their first flight. such as NASA (opens on new page).
Science on board
Connor added “among all the astronauts here, we’ll be doing 25 different experiments, covering over 100 hours of research during our eight days on the ISS.”
In addition to rigorous training for their flight, every 10 days, the Ax-1 team will fly along with the scientific experiments they will perform while on board. These experiments are in a “brain headhead” provided by Israeli startup Brain.Space.
Stibbe will take on the “brain headhead” along with some other tests submitted on the side of the nonprofit Ramon Foundation, which Stibbe also founded in honor of his friend Ilan Ramon. Ramon, the first Israeli pilot (Stibbe the second), died during a flight to Columbia in 2003.
What does an astronaut do?
Until recent history, the term “astronaut” had a very specific and narrow definition. But today, government -sponsored airports aren’t the only ones letting people into the air.
In 2001, Dennis Tito, an American engineer and businessman, became the first tourist to pay for his own space travel. Since then, the space industry has expanded significantly, including the list of people who fall under the category of “private astronauts.”
During the past year, several companies have made progress in providing private flight missions.
Last summer, for example, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin introduced their first flight, each suborbital spacecraft (although they have reached different altitudes with different vehicle types). These suborbital planes were followed by the first private missionary to introduce people to the orbital world: Inspiration4.
In September 2021, Inspiration4 sent a group of four citizens on a three -day orbital voyage around Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule as part of a major campaign to support St. Louis. Jude Children’s Hospital. The sailors also performed experiments on the ship during their mission.
Ax-1 will break new into the new world: It will be the first full-fledged expedition to visit the International Space Station.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd (opens on new page). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens on new page) and on Facebook.
