Once aboard the International Space Station, Axiom Space Vice President and former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegra stated that his team would not interrupt the station's existing crew members.
They shouldn't be called 'tourists' when they go to the ISS for $55 million because they'll be doing studies while in space, according to López-Alegra.
Axiom Space Ax-1 Crew Says They're Not Space Tourists
The ticket price for the three business moguls has been widely reported as $55 million apiece, a figure that has not been challenged by Axiom Space, the corporation in charge of the journey.
The commander of the Ax-1 mission, Lopez-Alegria, said via Aviation Pros: "We are not space tourists." "I think there's an important role for space tourism, but it is not what Axiom is about," he added.
López-Algeria said during a briefing about the impending trip by commercial spaceflight company Axiom Space (per Futurism) that the Ax-1 crew is going to the ISS to undertake some serious science.
The four will conduct 26 experiments in the orbiting laboratory's microgravity environment, roughly 250 miles above the Earth's surface.
Heart and stem cell research and a technological demonstration for a self-assembling spaceship are among the projects.
During the first consumer space journey, López-Alegra vowed that his crew members would be "standard bearers" and "set the bar very, very high."
Hopefully, they won't annoy the experts too much, since, let's face it, they already have a lot on their plates.
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Ax-1 Mission Crew
The AX-1 mission, which will launch on March 30 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, will be led by López-Algeria.
López-Algeria will fly to the International Space Station with three other crew members and spend eight days there. They want to carry out a number of scientific tests there. However, the project represents a new frontier for the private space sector for those of us on Earth.
Inverse said private persons have already been to the ISS, but this is the first private space flight with solely paying clients (and, of course, López-Algeria).
Larry Connor, a real estate investor from the United States, Eytan Stibbe, a former Israeli fighter pilot and businessman, and Mark Pathy, a Canadian businessman, make up the crew.
According to Christian Maender, head of in-space research and production at Axiom Space, the crew members will conduct at least 25 experiments aboard the ISS to investigate the health consequences of space flight, the architecture of space homes, spacecraft self-assembly, and more.
About Ax-1 Mission
Since August 2021, the crew has been training at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and other NASA sites.
Daily Mail said the crew was able to get familiar with the ISS systems, scientific facilities onboard, and emergency protocols as a result of this training.
The four have been training with NASA as well as the European Space Agency (ESA) and SpaceX at SpaceX's Hawthorne, California headquarters.
They have gotten familiar with the functioning of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will transport them to and from the station, thanks to their SpaceX training.
In December, NASA began working on simulations with the Axiom mission operations team to acquire a sense of how the first all-citizen crew on the ISS will operate.
This operation enabled NASA and Axiom ground control to become familiar with "the dynamic portions of the private astronauts' trip to and from the space station."
The mission takes place against the backdrop of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions between the US and Russia over the International Space Station.
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