Axiom Space aims for early May launch of 2nd commercial mission to ISS

Another commercial mission by Axiom Space hitching a ride from SpaceX to the International Space Station is targeting launch in just over a month from Kennedy Space Center.

Officials with NASA, Axiom and SpaceX announced during a press call Thursday the first opportunity will be May 8 at 10:43 p.m. atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A with a planned docking at the ISS on May 10 for a 10-day stay on board.

The Ax-2 mission follows the first-ever all-private crew to visit the ISS when Axiom Space brought four passengers in 2022 for what ended up being more than a 15-day stay, about a week longer than planned.

“With Ax-1 we had quite a bit of lessons learned both with NASA and SpaceX, our partner on this mission and the last mission,” said Axiom Space President and CEO Michael Suffredini. “We’ve had some 200 or so lessons learned that we followed through and made adjustments to how we plan, how we train, how we ultimately will fly the mission to take advantage of what we’ve learned.”

The crew will be commanded by Axiom Space’s Director of Human Spaceflight and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who will lead businessman and aviator John Shoffner acting as pilot and two mission specialist seats paid for by the Saudi Space Commission for Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali AlQarni. Barnawi will be the first Saudi woman in space.

Suffredini said the quartet will take part in more than 20 research experiments as well as STEM outreach back on Earth.

“We have to remind them occasionally that you know, the objective is of course to experience the moment, given all the research they have to do,” he said.

The quartet will ride up in the Crew Dragon Freedom making its second flight after completing the Crew-4 mission to the ISS from April-October 2022.

For Ax-1, the three other passengers all paid $55 million for the trip to space. Axiom Space has not said how much was paid by Shoffner or the Saudi Space Commission.

Whitson, who previously served as chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office, and flew on several shuttle and Soyuz flights with nearly 666 days in space, takes a role similar to former NASA astronaut and current Axiom employee Michael López-Alegría who commanded Ax-1.

“Space is really changing right now and I’m really excited to be a part of expanding humanity’s access to this amazing frontier,” she said.

She hammered home the capability of her three crewmates calling them “an extremely talented crew that has not only met, but surpassed the training requirements for this mission.”

“We’ve trained at NASA, SpaceX, we’ve also trained at the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency,” she said. “We’ve done centrifuge training, zero G flights, outdoor and confined environment training for team building. So I really feel that that has prepared us very well.”

NASA has made it a requirement for any commercial company that visits the ISS to have a former NASA astronaut as commander. Axiom Space competes for visits to the ISS although no other company has been awarded the rights to visit by NASA yet. NASA approved a third Axiom mission that could fly as early as this fall.

Axiom has brokered partnerships with five countries so far to provide rides to space. That includes Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Italy, Hungary and the United Arab Emirates. Currently on the ISS who flew up as part of NASA’s Crew-6 mission is Emirati astronaut Sultan AlNeyadi, who was given the seat as part of a trade with Roscosmos that had been purchased by Axiom Space.

Suffredini said he expects Axiom’s next several missions to focus on satisfying these government partnerships. These are countries that don’t have the same access to the ISS as the U.S., Russia, Canada, Japan and European Space Agency members.

“We’re a U.S. company for sure, but we’re a global provider of services. So we’re being agnostic,” he said.

The missions are the precursor to Axiom Space’s plans to build out its own space station, starting by piggybacking on the ISS with a first module to be flown up and attached in late 2025. A second in 2026 will allow for up to eight crew and have its own two docking ports. A third research and science module would come by 2027 with its own “exclusive area to do research and manufacturing on orbit.”

The plan is to then send up its own power and life-support system that would allow its modules to separate from the ISS by 2029, one year ahead of the station’s planned retirement.

“All of these flights are really stepwise approaches to sort of growing the economy in low-Earth orbit and taking advantage of the work that’s been going on the ISS for the last 20 years,” he said.

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