The private US company’s third flight is the first in which it is trying a new business model: selling spaceflights to government players who don’t have their own ships. It should be expected that this approach will become much more common in the future. Moreover, such crews can start flying not to the ISS, as this time, but only on long flights in orbit on new generation SpaceX ships.

Today, January 19, 2024, SpaceX launched the Axiom-3 manned mission of another American private company, Axiom Space, from the LC-39A launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Crew Dragon spacecraft named Freedom, which bears his name, has a crew of four on this flight, and everyone except the captain is going to space for the first time.

Ship commander Michael Lopez-Alegria is one of the oldest cosmonauts in history, 65 years old. He is a former NASA astronaut and currently works for Axiom Space. The rest of the crew are paying passengers of the company. Although some media outlets describe this crew as the first European private crew, this is not entirely true. In addition to the pilot from the Italian Air Force (paid by the Italian government), a Turkish citizen (the first Turkish astronaut paid by the Turkish government) and a Swedish citizen representing the European Space Agency are also on board. When the human capsule reaches the orbital station today, January 19, the current crew size will increase from seven to 11 people.

The crew plans to conduct more than 30 experiments on the station in areas ranging from the physiological effects of weightlessness on the human body to genetics, metallurgy, brain and stem cell research. It is worth noting that this was the first flight in history of an astronaut under the Italian flag: so far they have flown only under the flag of the European Space Agency. Also, for the first time, the European Space Agency is sending a human into space not with a US government ship, but with the help of a private company (as you know, Europe does not have its own manned ship and never has).

It is not known exactly how much the contractor organizations paid for the seats in this mission, but according to some estimates, Axiom Space was demanding between 38 and 55 million dollars for such flights. The company had previously sent two missions into space, the first of which was flown by private individuals (“space tourists”) and the second of which was attended by two government cosmonauts paid by Saudi Arabia.

The Freedom spacecraft has flown to the ISS twice before: in 2022 for NASA and in 2023 for Axiom Space. He spent a total of 179 days in space, most of which were docked with the orbital station. In principle, NASA does not order launches for reusable ships from SpaceX and only purchases launches from the company for the first time in the spacecraft’s “flight career”. Therefore, the company sells the second and subsequent voyages of its ships to other private players. It is assumed that a similar practice will become the norm for flights of the next type of ship – Starship.

However, if Axiom Space normally carries only four people (and cannot exceed seven), then Starship can theoretically carry up to a hundred people, and its internal volume exceeds that of the ISS. In other words, starting in the 2020s, private space missions may no longer need the ISS as a destination because they will remain in orbit for an extended period of time without an orbital station and conduct scientific experiments on the same ship that launched them. Interestingly, although SpaceX has its own team of astronauts at its disposal and could independently try to sell “space tickets” to countries that do not have access to it, the company did not choose this path and plans to concentrate its team in space. flights in their own interests – to the Moon and Mars.