There's a Crew Dragon capsule parked at the International Space Station right now with four guys inside who aren't NASA astronauts, aren't cosmonauts, and aren't even employees of the company that built the rocket. They bought their way there. Axiom Space's Ax-1 mission launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 8th, docked to the station the next morning, and as of this week the crew is still up there, floating around doing experiments and, presumably, staring out the cupola window a lot.
The commander is Michael López-Alegría, a genuinely accomplished former NASA astronaut who's now a VP at Axiom, so he's not really a tourist, he's staff. But the other three, Larry Connor, Mark Pathy, and Eytan Stibbe, are private citizens who reportedly paid something like $55 million a seat for the privilege. Eight days, give or take, in orbit. That's not a typo. Fifty five million dollars.
I keep doing the math on this in my head at weird moments, like while I'm waiting for my coffee to brew. $55 million divided by roughly 8 days works out to something like $7 million a day. Divide that further and you're around $290,000 an hour just to exist in microgravity and eat freeze dried lasagna. I don't say this to be a scold about billionaires (well, maybe a little). I actually think private spaceflight companies driving down launch costs is one of the genuinely good tech stories of the last decade, SpaceX especially. Reusable boosters aren't a gimmick, they've changed the economics of getting stuff into orbit, full stop. But there's a real difference between "this technology is getting cheaper" and "regular people can afford this," and Ax-1 makes that gap pretty obvious. Nobody I know is putting $55 million on a card.
What's actually interesting to me isn't the price tag though, it's what these three are doing up there. Connor is running cardiac stem cell research and spinal disc experiments. Pathy is involved in projects on kids' health and clean water tech, funding some of it through his own foundation. Stibbe, who flew F-16s for the Israeli Air Force back in the 1980s, is running dozens of experiments for Israeli universities and companies, plus an art project involving materials that behave differently under microgravity. So it isn't just rich guys taking selfies in zero g, even though I'm sure there's been some of that too. There's real science riding along, funded in a way that never would have gotten a NASA budget line item.
I watched the launch livestream at around 11:15pm my time with the lights off, which is a thing I still do for basically every crewed launch even though I've probably watched a hundred of them by now and really should just go to bed. My wife thinks it's ridiculous. Maybe it is. But there's something about watching a capsule light up on top of a rocket, knowing there are people strapped into it, that never gets old for me. Doesn't matter how routine SpaceX has made sticking the landing on the drone ship at this point.
The bigger question hanging over all this, and one Ax-1 doesn't really answer on its own, is whether the ISS can keep hosting missions like this long term, or whether it's more of a bridge to Axiom's own commercial station later this decade. NASA has been pretty open that it wants private stations replacing the ISS eventually, partly because the station is old (some modules are pushing 24 years now) and partly because NASA would rather be a customer buying seats and lab time than the landlord running the whole building. Ax-1 is basically a proof of concept for that model, whether or not the four guys currently up there are thinking about it in those terms while they're strapped to a treadmill trying not to lose bone density.
Anyway. They're due back down in a week or so, splashdown off the Florida coast, assuming the weather actually cooperates this time. It didn't cooperate for the launch, which got scrubbed twice before it finally flew. If you want to watch the splashdown at some unreasonable hour, I will probably be right there again with the lights off.