A private mission launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Thursday.
Unlike previous such flights, none of the passengers are wealthy space tourists who pay for their own orbit. Instead, three of the crew members are sponsored by their nations — Italy, Sweden and Turkey. For Turkey, the crew member is the country’s first astronaut.
The flight, by Axiom Space of Houston, is part of a new era where nations no longer need to build their own rockets and spacecraft to undertake a human spaceflight program. Now they can simply buy rides from a commercial company, almost like buying an airline ticket.
The astronauts were aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket, launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After a day’s delay for additional vehicle checks, the countdown proceeded smoothly, the rocket’s engines firing at 4:49 p.m. Eastern time.
The spacecraft is expected to arrive at the space station early Saturday morning.
The private astronaut mission, Ax-3, is the third for Axiom, which is also developing its own space station and making new spacesuits for NASA. It chartered this rocket flight from SpaceX and is sending paying customers for a two-week stay on the International Space Station starting in 2022. In 2019, NASA opened the space station section to visitors, a reversal from previous policies. (Russia has hosted a number of space tourists on the International Space Station since 2001.)
For the European Space Agency and its 22 nations, commercial flights like Axiom’s offer a way to get more Europeans into space and emphasize the mix of traditional and commercial space programs.
ESA currently pays 8.3 percent of the space station’s cost, so its astronauts get that fraction of the six-month assignments there. That currently equates to just four flights between now and the space station’s planned retirement in 2030.
“We don’t have that many flights, so we can’t give every member state an astronaut,” said Frank De Winne, head of ESA’s astronaut office. “Its amazing.”
But Marcus Wandt, the Swedish astronaut on Thursday’s Axiom flight, will arrive at the International Space Station flying commercial.
“If Axiom didn’t have that option available, it wouldn’t have happened now,” Mr. Wandt said during a news conference last week.
Mr. Wandt, a fighter and test pilot, applied to become an astronaut at ESA a few years ago. Out of 22,500 applicants, he made it to the final round of selections, but was not one of the five ESA selected as new full-time astronauts.
However, he was named a “reserve” astronaut. These are unpaid positions, but reserve astronauts are eligible for training and space missions if a commercial opportunity arises and their country is willing to pay for the ticket.
“That’s why we created the reserve force,” Mr De Winne said.
Ax-3 crew members aren’t the first government astronauts to pay their way into orbit this way.
The United Arab Emirates bought a flight on a Russian Soyuz rocket for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station in 2019 for one of its astronauts, Hazzaa Al-Mansoori. Axiom Space has arranged a six-month stay on the space station for a second Emirati astronaut, Sultan Alneyadi, in 2023. Saudi Arabia also flew two astronauts to the International Space Station on the last Axiom flight last year.
In March, Swedish officials heard that Axiom had an empty slot on this private astronaut mission. “If we could make a quick decision, this was a possibility for us to do it,” said Anna Rathsman, director general of the Swedish National Space Agency.
“We realized that this kind of opportunity doesn’t happen very often,” said Mats Persson, the Swedish minister for higher education, research and space. “And when we got it, we got it.”
Sweden, with financial contributions from the space agency, the Swedish armed forces and companies such as Saab, paid nearly 450 million Swedish kroner, or about $43 million, to get Mr. Wandt into space. That’s less than the $55 million Axiom originally said in 2018 it would charge for a seat. (Axiom now refuses to disclose the cost.)
With the deal taking effect, Mr. Wandt was promoted from reserve astronaut to project astronaut — a position with a year’s pay for that mission. Her work on the space station includes an experiment that traces the effects of zero gravity on stem cells and how architectural arrangements in space affect the physical and mental well-being of astronauts.
Other ESA members have also signed up for future Axiom flights. Similar to Sweden’s deal for Mr Wandt, Poland has an astronaut, Slawosz Uznanski, who is another of ESA’s reserve astronauts, ready for a future Axiom flight. The UK Space Agency has also signed a deal with Axiom to fly its astronauts into orbit.
On this flight, other crew members include Alper Gezeravci, a fighter pilot in the Turkish Air Force, and Walter Villadei, a colonel in the Italian Air Force.
As the first Turkish astronaut, Mr. Gezeravci hopes to be an inspiration to future generations in his country.
“This space flight is not the destination of our journey,” he said during the crew’s press conference. “This is just the beginning of our journey.”
Mr. Villadei from Italy, the pilot of the mission, has already been in space, but only for a few minutes. He was one of three members of the Italian Air Force to fly on a Virgin Galactic suborbital flight last June, carrying out several experiments in biomedicine, fluid dynamics and materials science.
Although Italy is also a member of ESA, the trip was arranged for Mr Villadei by the Italian Air Force and not the country’s space agency.
Serving as mission commander is Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut and now chief astronaut at Axiom. NASA requires that private astronaut missions be led by a former NASA astronaut.
Other nations have also taken the commercial approach to human spaceflight, and the idea is not new.
More than a decade ago, Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune in real estate, including the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, planned to open private resorts that would be leased to paying customers, mostly nations, which he called “dominant customers.”
Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, has signed memorandums of understanding with countries including the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Australia and Britain.
Due to delays in the development of spacecraft by other aerospace companies that would transport people to and from the space stations, Bigelow’s plans never got off the ground.
But Michael Gold, who was then director of Bigelow Aerospace’s Washington office, said Bigelow’s early efforts helped pave the way for what Axiom is doing now.
Mr. Gold said that at that time, a foreign space tourist would have to be accompanied by someone from the US Defense Technology Security Administration to make sure the tourist did not gain knowledge of any controlled aerospace technologies.
In the end, federal officials decided it wasn’t necessary.
“This is a great example of how the early work we did at Bigelow Aerospace pioneered the creation of the ecosystem that Axiom Space and any number of other companies are leveraging today,” said Mr. Gold, now head of Redwire. space infrastructure company.