{"id":246737,"date":"2021-05-11T00:08:35","date_gmt":"2021-05-10T21:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/crew-training-begins-soon-for-first-private-trip-to-iss\/"},"modified":"2021-05-11T00:08:35","modified_gmt":"2021-05-10T21:08:35","slug":"crew-training-begins-soon-for-first-private-trip-to-iss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/crew-training-begins-soon-for-first-private-trip-to-iss\/","title":{"rendered":"#Crew training begins soon for first private trip to ISS"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Crew training begins soon for first private trip<\/a> to ISS<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n The International Space Station photographed in 2018 from a Soyuz spacecraft
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Training of the crew for the first entirely private trip to the International Space Station (ISS) is to begin soon, Axiom Space, the company behind the flight, said Monday at a joint press conference with NASA.<\/p>\n


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Four astronauts are to be launched to the ISS in late January aboard a rocket built by another space company, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.<\/p>\n

Only one of the four\u2014NASA veteran Michael Lopez-Alegria\u2014has been in space before.<\/p>\n

The other three are businessmen\u2014Larry Conner, an American, Mark Pathy, a Canadian, and Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli.<\/p>\n

The mission dubbed Ax-1 is to last around 10 days, said Axiom Space president and CEO Michael Suffredini.<\/p>\n

The astronauts will work and live in the American section of the space station and plan to conduct a number of scientific experiments while in orbit.<\/p>\n

“We’ll be starting what I would call serious training next week,” said Lopez-Alegria, the Ax-1 commander.<\/p>\n

“From there the pace will pick up, and we’ll all be immersed essentially full time in ISS systems and Crew Dragon training starting in the fall.”<\/p>\n

He said the four men had only been together a “handful of times” because of the Covid-19 pandemic but would take a “bonding” camping trip in Alaska in July.<\/p>\n

Lopez-Alegria said he will start full-time training in August and Connor, the mission pilot, will begin in September.<\/p>\n

Starting in October, all four will begin Houston-based training on the ISS systems and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule.<\/p>\n

Axiom Space considers the mission a first step in its plan to build the first commercial space station.<\/p>\n

Asked about the cost of Ax-1, Suffredini said we “general<\/a>ly don’t talk about specific pricing.”<\/p>\n

“It’s been widely reported\u2014numbers in the tens of millions\u2014which I wouldn’t argue with,” he said.<\/p>\n

Phil McAlister, director of NASA’s commercial spaceflight development, said the mission is a “renaissance in US human spaceflight.”<\/p>\n

“This is a real inflection point,” he said.<\/p>\n

The US space agency is aiming for two such private missions a year.<\/p>\n

“We are seeing a lot of interest in private astronaut missions,” said Angela Hart, NASA’s manager of commercial low-Earth orbit development.<\/p>\n

“At this point the demand exceeds what we actually believe the opportunities on station will be,” Hart said.<\/p>\n

Seven “space tourists” flew to the ISS between 2001 and 2009 aboard Russian Soyuz rockets.<\/p>\n\n

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1st private space crew paying $55M each to fly to station\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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\n \u00a9 2021 AFP<\/p>\n

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Citation<\/strong>:
\n Crew training begins soon for first private trip to ISS (2021, May 10)
\n retrieved 10 May 2021
\n from https:\/\/phys.org\/news<\/a>\/2021-05-crew-private-iss.html<\/p>\n

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