A private mission launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Thursday. Unlike on earlier such flights, none of the passengers are wealthy space tourists paying their own way to 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 have to build their own rockets and spacecraft to undertake a human spaceflight program. Now they can simply purchase rides from a commercial company, almost like buying a plane ticket. The astronauts were riding in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After a day’s delay for additional checks of the vehicle, the countdown proceeded smoothly, the rocket’s engines lighting up at 4:49 p.m. Eastern time. The spacecraft arrived 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 has been sending paying customers for two-week stays at the International Space Station since 2022. In 2019, NASA opened up its part of the space station to visitors, a reversal from earlier policies. (Russia has hosted a series 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 of getting more Europeans to space and highlight the mixing of traditional and commercial space programs. ESA is currently paying 8.3 percent of the space station’s costs and thus its astronauts receive that fraction of the six-month assignments there. That currently corresponds to just four flights from now until the space station’s scheduled retirement in 2030.
“We don’t have so many flights, so we can’t give every member state an astronaut,” said Frank De Winne, the head of ESA’s astronaut office. “That’s impossible.” But Marcus Wandt, the Swedish astronaut on Thursday’s Axiom flight, will get to the International Space Station by flying commercial. “If Axiom wouldn’t have had this option available, it wouldn’t have happened now,” Wandt said during a news conference last week. Wandt, a fighter and test pilot, applied to become an astronaut at ESA a couple of years ago. From 22,500 applicants, he made it to the final round of selections but was not one of the five whom ESA chose as new full-time astronauts.
He was, however, named a “reserve” astronaut. These are unpaid positions, but reserve astronauts are eligible for training and a mission to space if a commercial opportunity arises and their country is willing to pay for the ticket. “This is why we created the reserve corps,” De Winne said. The Ax-3 crew members are not the first government astronauts to pay their way to orbit in this fashion. The United Arab Emirates purchased a flight on a Russian Soyuz rocket for an eight-day stay at the International Space Station in 2019 for one of its astronauts, Hazzaa Al-Mansoori. Axiom Space 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.
Chang is a science reporter