Photo: NASA
It’s not yet a full-blown hub for otherworldly tourism, but the International Space Station (ISS) is quickly becoming the go-to place for private citizens in need of the ultimate space adventure.
The orbital laboratory has been up there for more than 24 years now. It became operational in 1998, and up until 2021, it was visited solely by highly trained, government-backed astronauts. And then the Russians came along.
It was then when a Russian Soyuz MS-19 spaceship took off with three people on board, of which only one, Anton Shkaplerov, is an astronaut in the sense we still understand it today. The other two were an actress, Yulia Peresild, and a film producer, Anton Shkaplerov, taking the trip to film some movie scenes in actual space (sorry, Tom Cruise).
Publicity stunt vibes aside, the presence of these two people on the ISS marked the inception of something we all knew was coming: the rise to power of private astronauts. Since the time the Russian film crew went up there, several more civilians made the journey to space: some on brief excursions just beyond the Karman line, like the tourists flown by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, and others on days-long journeys in Earth’s orbit, like the crew of Inspiration4.
As far as the ISS itself is concerned, the Russians were followed inside the station in 2022 by the (private) people of the Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1), who spent more than 17 days up there and came back down to Earth in perfect safety.
The success of Ax-1 really seems to have made NASA, which is getting ready to ditch the ISS early next decade, confident this is how the future looks like. So get ready for a lot more private missions heading up in the years ahead.
The second private mission to the ISS has already been announced back in February 2023, and it will have a SpaceX Crew Dragon fly a crew of four, of which only one is a trained astronaut, to the station. With a launch date set for May, this is also an Axiom-funded mission (Ax-2), and it will take to space, for the first time, two astronauts from a country that’s never had a space exploration program in the proper sense: Saudi Arabia.
As we’re getting ready to get a glimpse at the Artemis Moon exploration spacesuits, scheduled to be unveiled later today (March 15), NASA just announced it cleared Axiom to take a third crew up to the ISS later this year. The mission, which will obviously be called Ax-3, will not depart before November 2023, and is scheduled to last for two full weeks. The exact specifics of the mission are not known yet.
As usual when it comes to sending civilians to space, NASA will have to greenlight the names of the people going there. Ax-3 will be a four-people mission as well, but the names of the astronauts have not been submitted for approval yet.
It was then when a Russian Soyuz MS-19 spaceship took off with three people on board, of which only one, Anton Shkaplerov, is an astronaut in the sense we still understand it today. The other two were an actress, Yulia Peresild, and a film producer, Anton Shkaplerov, taking the trip to film some movie scenes in actual space (sorry, Tom Cruise).
Publicity stunt vibes aside, the presence of these two people on the ISS marked the inception of something we all knew was coming: the rise to power of private astronauts. Since the time the Russian film crew went up there, several more civilians made the journey to space: some on brief excursions just beyond the Karman line, like the tourists flown by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, and others on days-long journeys in Earth’s orbit, like the crew of Inspiration4.
As far as the ISS itself is concerned, the Russians were followed inside the station in 2022 by the (private) people of the Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1), who spent more than 17 days up there and came back down to Earth in perfect safety.
The success of Ax-1 really seems to have made NASA, which is getting ready to ditch the ISS early next decade, confident this is how the future looks like. So get ready for a lot more private missions heading up in the years ahead.
The second private mission to the ISS has already been announced back in February 2023, and it will have a SpaceX Crew Dragon fly a crew of four, of which only one is a trained astronaut, to the station. With a launch date set for May, this is also an Axiom-funded mission (Ax-2), and it will take to space, for the first time, two astronauts from a country that’s never had a space exploration program in the proper sense: Saudi Arabia.
As we’re getting ready to get a glimpse at the Artemis Moon exploration spacesuits, scheduled to be unveiled later today (March 15), NASA just announced it cleared Axiom to take a third crew up to the ISS later this year. The mission, which will obviously be called Ax-3, will not depart before November 2023, and is scheduled to last for two full weeks. The exact specifics of the mission are not known yet.
As usual when it comes to sending civilians to space, NASA will have to greenlight the names of the people going there. Ax-3 will be a four-people mission as well, but the names of the astronauts have not been submitted for approval yet.
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