Flying to space is becoming easier for the every day citizen.
Ten days after liftoff at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Houston space company Axiom Space saw its second commercial space mission, Axiom Mission 2, return to Earth from the International Space Station. The four-person crew held a media briefing shortly after landing led by Commander Peggy Whitson, Axiom’s director of Human Spaceflight.
Whitson previously made two trips to the ISS as a NASA astronaut, and said it's refreshing to know more people will get to experience trips to outer space in coming years as more companies such as Axiom prioritize private space tourism.
“To me, it’s still going back home to go to the space station,” Whitson said. “But what’s exciting to me is that space is changing, getting more commercialized. And I’m excited to be a part of that and to share it with my crew.”
Whitson extended her record as the woman with the longest tenure in space, with over 675 days logged on previous missions with NASA. This time, however, she was accompanied by first-timers John Shoffner, an entrepreneur and former racecar driver, Rayyanah Barnawi, a biomedical researcher at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Institute in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Ali AlQarni, a former fighter pilot. All three shared their favorite moments in space, ranging from experiencing takeoff to conducting experiments.
Barnawi and AlQarni are representing the Saudi Space Commission, the space agency of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Last November, Axiom Space announced a partnership with the kingdom for two seats on board Ax-2. Saudi scientists have also been involved in designing experiments from the ground to be conducted in space, including tests related to cloud seeding, a weather modification technique that can induce rain or snow.
“From the scientific point of view, it was very important that we conducted cloud seeding experiments, which hopefully we can bring a lot of benefits from," AlQarni said. "We are hoping to develop new technologies to increase efficiency, as currently the process only results in a 30% chance of precipitation."
Other experiments the crew conducted include how certain cells in the human body, such as stem cells and types of cancer cells, react to zero-gravity environments.
“The stem cells are adherent cells, and they behaved differently from all the other cell experiments we worked on,” Barnawi said.
Ax-2 is the second of four commercial flights Axiom has planned in partnership with California-based SpaceX, which supplied the Dragon spacecraft that carried the crew to the ISS and back. Axiom’s long-term goals involve establishing a low-earth orbit commercial spaceflight economy, which could see tourism, research and manufacturing in space, and CEO Michael Suffredini previously said the company’s activities as well as other space development could lead to an economic boom for Houston.
The International Space Station is set to cease operations in 2030. The status of its replacement is up in the air. Axiom itself is planning to be one of the candidates thanks to its proposed Axiom Station, which the company has billed as the first private free-flying space station.
The company broke ground on new headquarters at the Houston Spaceport in 2022, which will be used to construct the Axiom Station and to train future astronauts. While the building is under construction, Axiom has leased a 146,000-square-foot former Fry’s Electronics building, which the company moved into in late 2022.
The company also landed and completed a bumper $228.5 million contract to design spacesuits for NASA’s Artemis III mission. The completed suit, known as the AxEMU, was revealed in March.
NASA confirmed Axiom Mission 3 will take off no earlier than November 2023, according to a post on the agency’s website.
