A SpaceX Falcon 9 launched Crew Dragon Endeavour towards its third docking to the International Space Station (ISS) on April 8 at 15:17 UTC, carrying four commercial astronauts conducting Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission, which has goals of getting experience in microgravity and also conducting research and philanthropic activities.

Also making another trip to send people into orbit was Falcon 9 first stage B1062, making its fifth flight. It successfully landed on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas.

Over the last few years, NASA has been trying to encourage the commercial use of space and in particular the International Space Station. Besides the commercial facilities and even an airlock module on the ISS, there have been two programs to provide services: the Commercial Cargo Program and Commercial Crew Program. Commercial Cargo essentially saved SpaceX from bankruptcy after three failed Falcon 1 launches in the early days of the company.

The next major part of this was the Commercial Crew Program, under which NASA contracted two companies – SpaceX and Boeing – to design and build spacecraft to take NASA astronauts and others to orbit. The end result of this was SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, developed with NASA funding and technical support. Boeing is… still trying.

This mission, the next phase of NASA’s efforts to encourage the commercial use of space, is the first wholly commercially-operated crewed mission to the ISS. NASA has contracted with Axiom to attach modules to the ISS segment in the years leading up to its deorbiting. Prior to it being deorbited, currently scheduled for 2028, the Axiom modules will become their own independent space station. The first Axiom module is scheduled to go up to the ISS in 2024.

After a long 22 hours in orbit phasing towards the ISS (a long trip compared to the three to six hours on the Soyuz that NASA astronauts and previous space tourists used to fly), the capsule autonomously docked to the zenith, or space facing port, of Node 2 on April 9. Crew Dragon takes this slower approach because it’s easier on mission planning, and there is much more space in the Crew Dragon than in the Soyuz module. They will spend eight days docked to the ISS doing science and philanthropic activities. Following their first flight, Axiom Space plans to offer crewed flights to the ISS as often as twice per year, “aligning with the flight opportunities as they are made available by NASA”.

The Crew of Ax-1 is composed of former NASA astronaut and current Director of Business Development at Axiom Space, Michael López-Alegría, and three private astronauts — Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy.  López-Alegría flew to space four previous times: three times on the Space Shuttle and once on a Soyuz. This flight makes him only the seventh person to fly into space on three different types of spacecraft, after Walter Shirra, John Young, Shane Kimbrough, Aki Hoshide, Soichi Noguchi, and Thomas Marshburn. He was Commander of  Expedition 14 in 2006 and set several space records, including the second-most EVA time overall, over the course of ten EVAs.

The Ax-1 crew will conduct a packed program of science, with the crew performing more than 25 experiments in many areas. These include stem cell studies for cancer research and “self-assembling satellites”, among others.

MIT’s TESSERAE experiment is exploring self-assembling satellites. The experiment consists of a series of tiles with magnets that, once on the ISS, will unfold and assemble themselves into a structure autonomously. These structures will have many uses in the future, including a future space telescope mirror and a base on the surface of another planetary body.

The cancer stem cell experiment will use microgravity to age cancer stem cells faster than they would on Earth. It will evaluate the early stages of cancer in structures called tumor organoids, which are artificially constructed models of small parts of the human body produced to study specific things. The experiment will look for certain molecules called biomarkers, which can help provide an early diagnosis of cancer. On orbit, the crew will examine the samples in a microscope as they go through cycles of growth.

We’ll have updates on all of these experiments and more when Ax-1 returns to Earth on April 18, and we’ll also bring you coverage of SpaceX’s Crew-4 mission that is scheduled to launch later this month.

More Information

More than 25 ISS National Lab-sponsored Investigations on first all-private astronaut mission to the space station (Axiom Space)

PDF: Ax-1 Mission Timeline (Axiom Space)

Axiom Space Ax-1 mission to expand health, technology researchers’ access to ISS (Axiom Space)

PDF: Axiom Space reveals historic first private crew to visit International Space Station (Axiom Space)

PDF: Michael López-Alegría bio (Axiom Space)

Axiom Space plans first-ever fully private human spaceflight mission to International Space Station (Axiom Space)