Credit: NASA TV
The Axiom Ax-1, the first fully commercial spaceflight to the International Space Station (ISS), took off on Friday with the first all-private astronaut team to ever fly to the orbiting outpost.
Axiom’s four-man team lifted from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, riding atop a Falcon 9 rocket furnished and flown by Elon Musk’s commercial space launch venture SpaceX.
The quartet is led by retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria. He'll be joined by three paying customers: Larry Connor, a real estate and technology entrepreneur and aerobatics aviator from Ohio, who has been designated mission pilot. Investor-philanthropist and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe, and Canadian businessman and philanthropist Mark Pathy, round out the crew and will both serve as mission specialists.
The launch is being hailed by NASA, Axiom Space - the company behind the launch, and other industry players as a turning point in the latest expansion of commercial space ventures collectively referred to by insiders as the low-Earth orbit economy.
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