The opportunity to see a total solar eclipse is capturing the attention of millions across the country, spacecraft are going through key environmental testing and a Florida resident is dealing with an out-of-this-world garbage problem.

These are just some of the topics on deck for this week’s edition of News from the Press Site. The hour-long, live show begins at 4 p.m. EDT (2000 UTC) on the Spaceflight Now YouTube channel.

This week, we’re joined by Emilee Speck, space journalist with FOX Weather, and Stephen Clark, space reporter with Ars Technica. Join the conversation by using the Superchat feature while the video is live.

Emilee Speck, FOX Weather:

• Eclipse phases: What are Baily’s Beads and Diamond Ring? https://www.foxweather.com/earth-spac…

• Total solar eclipse forecast shows who has best chance for clear skies on April 8th https://www.foxweather.com/weather-ne…

• Ed Dwight, first US Black astronaut candidate, will finally get to space with Blue Origin at 90 years old https://www.foxweather.com/earth-spac…

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica:

• Rocket Report: Blue Origin to resume human flights; progress for Polaris Dawn https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04…

• Space experts foresee an “operational need” for nuclear power on the Moon https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04…

• Trash from the International Space Station may have hit a house in Florida https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04…

For the second time this year, SpaceX sent a quartet of people up to the International Space Station using its Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. They had to wait another day given that weather along the ascent corridor did not permit a launch late Saturday night.

Liftoff of the Crew-8 mission from historic Launch Complex 39A occurred on Sunday, March 3 at 10:53 p.m. EST (0353 UTC Monday). The launch was also delayed from March 1 due to poor weather in the downrange area off shore where crew would be rescued in the unlikely event of a mid-ascent mission abort.

The 45th Weather Squadron forecast 75 percent chance of favorable weather on Sunday with upper-level wind sheer being a watch item, along with clouds in the area of the launchpad.

The mission is a first for three out of the four members of Crew-8. Michael Barratt, the pilot, previously flew a Soyuz and Space Shuttle Discovery to the ISS in 2009 and 2011 respectively.

“The idea of multiple vehicles is just such a positive sign of human spaceflight to begin with,” Barratt said prior to liftoff. “Different entities: government agency, private agency, different government agency. Human spaceflight is flourishing and that’s a really good thing.”

Barratt said that while the SpaceX Dragon certainly has its perks as a newer vehicle, there’s something to be admired about his rides from the past.

“There’s a lot of common elements. Physics transfers quite nicely, but the functionality, the redundancy, the safety, the creature comforts, the human interfaces are all different between vehicles,” he said. “And I find that personally very exciting to learn those differences.”

Mission Specialist Jeannette Epps also trained on three different vehicles. She was first prepared to fly as a member of Expedition 56/57 in 2018, but was pulled from that mission without explanation from NASA. She was then assigned to the first operational flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft before it ran into years of delays.

She said all the commentary by people over the years is not important to her now. Epps said she’s just excited about finally being able to travel to space for the first time after being selected as an astronaut in 2009.

“I gotta stay focused on what’s important and number one for me is trying to be a conscientious worker and in training, being conscientious of the work that’s in front of me and making sure I’m not focusing on things that are not important anymore,” Epps said. “What happened in the past is in the past and it’s going to stay there. I don’t want to bring it forward because we have so much good stuff happening now.”

During a prelaunch press conference, Epps said that she the most important memento she will be taking with her up to space is a picture of her mom. In a one-on-one interview with Spaceflight Now, she emphasized the impact of her mom on her journey.

“She knew that I was selected for the astronaut and her words to me were that ‘I’m so happy for you. This is what you always wanted in life and I know you’re going to do well.’ And then, shortly after that, she passed away, which was kind of intense for me in that moment,” Epps said. “But having the corps and coming to Houston to live really kind of set me on path of really kind of wanting to make my mom proud of me, if that makes sense.”

Crew-8 Commander Matthew Dominick will be making his first flight to space as well. A member of the 2017 astronaut class, The Turtles, his flight to the space station will help maintain a continuous presence of this group of astronauts. The concept was jokingly called the “Turtle Takeover” by NASA astronaut Raja Chari when he and Kayla Barron launched as members of Crew-3 in 2021.

“We very nearly lost that. Luckily, there was a small accident with a booster that drove into a bridge, cause Crew-5 is great, Crew-5 is a great group of people, but their one drawback was no Turtles,” Dominick quipped. “And so, that moved the Crew-5 launch, it allowed Frank [Rubio] to bridge the gap of continuous turtle presence in space between Crew-4 and Crew-6.”

Dominick came to the astronaut corps from the U.S. Navy where he served as a test pilot. He logged more than 1,600 flight hours onboard 28 aircraft.

“You look at the movies and you think edge of the envelope flying, edge of the envelope of the aircraft, but a lot of test piloting is the planning and the engineering and working with the great groups of people that make it happen. And then every now and then, you go fly a test flight at the edge of the envelope,” Dominick said.

Rounding out the crew is Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin. A graduate of Irkutsk High Military Aviation School, he studied engineering and aircraft radio repair. He also studied radio communications and broadcasting at Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics.

He began cosmonaut training in 2018 and was awarded the position of test cosmonaut in 2021.

“I would say that for anyone who is doing anything in their life, they need to try and absorb, to the maximum ability, whatever they’re working on and to be and to be as multifaceted as possible,” Grebenkin said, speaking through a translator. “Everything I’ve learned has been very beneficial for me in my career as a cosmonaut. I would say I got selected thanks to what I did before.”

Grebenkin said training on Crew Dragon was challenging. He said the travel time between Russia and the United States for training also made it feel like a lengthy process.

“We had to travel a lot and you’re not just learning the new vehicle, you’re meeting a new training team, you’re getting accustomed to a new training approach. So, this is different,” he said.

New SpaceX records

The launch of the Crew-8 mission marked the fifth flight of the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft. It is now the flight leader of all Dragon spacecraft, either crew or cargo versions.

“We took a little extra time to talk through the work that we had done to make sure that we were ready to go fly that vehicle,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager during a prelaunch teleconference. “In particular, we had a number of special topics relative to the prop system.”

Stich said SpaceX replaced a number of valves to address previously seen corrosion on earlier flights. Adding to that Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, said having had the opportunity to fly 49 people an numerous cargo missions prior to this mission has taught them a lot.

With the Crew-8 launch, SpaceX has now sent a total of 53 people to orbit across 13 Dragon flights.

“We get a chance to experiment and see the hardware on other flights, so there’s a tremendous  advantage of flying as often as we do and flying the variety of missions that we get to go fly,” Gerstenmaier said. “It’s really nice to try some things on cargo vehicles and then see how they work and then make sure and then make sure that we’re getting the right performance that we need for the crew missions.”

Currently, Dragon vehicles are certified up to five flights, but NASA and SpaceX are working to extend that out to 15 missions.

“We may not get there in every single system. We’re starting that, we’re in the middle of doing that work. We’re in the middle of going through all those components,” Stich said. “Some are actually approved for 15 flights, some we’re still in the middle of working on, some of those components had to go through some re-qualification to make sure that they can make it out to 15 flights.”

A new Crew Dragon spacecraft is also currently in production in Hawthorne, California. Stich said it would likely be ready to fly the Crew-10 mission in early 2025. Gerstenmaier added that SpaceX anticipates having that vehicle be ready for service by the fall of 2024.

“So whenever NASA wants to go ahead and use that vehicle, it will be available sometime this fourth quarter of this year,” he said.

The first stage booster on this mission, tail number B1083, launched for the first time on this mission. It touched down at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station roughly 7.5 minutes after liftoff.

Those in the Central Florida heard a sonic boom as the booster came in for landing.

SpaceX is closing in on certifying its launch pad at Space Launch Complex 40 to support astronaut and cargo missions with its second-generation Dragon spacecraft. On Monday, the company performed a test of its new emergency egress system featuring a type of deployable slide.

The red slide flew out of a storage container positioned on the crew access tower and deployed along pre-stationed cables that extend to the ground, safely away from where a Falcon 9 rocket would stand. It differs notably from the slide-wire style baskets featured at Launch Complex 39A.

Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, alluded to Monday’s test during a teleconference about the forthcoming Crew-8 mission to the International Space Station. He said before they use the new tower to support an astronaut mission, they would like to test it out on one of their Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) flights.

“We would like to do a cargo flight first, if we can, and we think CRS-30 is probably the right time to do that,” Gerstenmaier said. “And the work’s pretty much completed at the pad. Got some stuff to do next week, but we’ll be in good shape for CRS-30.”

That mission is set for sometime in mid-March, though the date is still being shored up. Joel Montalbano, NASA’s ISS Program Manager, said it comes during an incredibly busy year for the Space Station.

“We have 17 ISS missions this year, this calendar year. So, it’s like the coolest game of Tetris to try and manage all this and then you add in the non-ISS missions and try and manage across the different launchpad availability,” Montalbano said.

Adding a human-rated pad for SpaceX would be a boost to both it and NASA. Currently, Launch Complex 39A is the only site that can support the launches of both the Cargo Dragon and Crew Dragon spacecraft.

During a press conference marking the arrival of the Crew-8 astronauts and cosmonaut, mission commander, NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, remarked about how busy the Cape has become.

“Who would’ve though five or six years ago that the competition for launch or the constraint to launch would be a launch pad?” Dominick said, referring to the recent launch of the IM-1 robotic mission to the Moon. “We delayed our launch a few days because there’s stiff competition to get out there to 39A. It’s not a rocket constraint, it’s a pad constraint.”

Steve Stich is among those looking forward to relieving some of that pressure by allowing pad 40 to share the Dragon load from pad 39A. He said NASA and SpaceX were able to validate some systems during the recent NG-20 launch, which sent Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft to the ISS with thousands of pounds of cargo and science supplies onboard.

“A lot of the crew systems that are required at the pad specifically for Dragon were not tested with the Northrop Grumman 20 flight. And then, we’re targeting to have it online by Crew-9 later this year for crew capability,” Stich said. “It’s good to have that redundancy. Something could always happen to the systems at 39A and so, we’re really happy to have that backup pad.”

Amid a flurry of astronaut missions scheduled for 2024, a commercial flight is aiming to mark a historic first: a non-governmental spacewalk.

This is just one of the goals of the Polaris Dawn mission, which was announced back in 2022. The mission’s commander, entrepreneur and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman, began working towards this mission shortly after the conclusion of his first spaceflight in 2021.

The Inspiration4 flight was a remarkable mission in its own right, as it became the first launch of an all-civilian group of astronauts, none of whom were current or former employees of a nation-state’s astronaut corps.

Isaacman and the mission’s pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, recently sat down with Spaceflight Now to discuss the Polaris Dawn undertaking.

“This time around, there’s a lot of emphasis on our kind of specific objectives, the altitude, especially the EVA (extravehicular activity) and the new suit development,” Isaacman said. “And unlike being there at the end where they say ‘Here’s your suit,’ we get to be there through every iteration of it, you know, starting with an IVA (intra-vehicular activity) suit that’s not really suitable for going outside the vehicle, to what we have now, which is getting close to the flight article.”

Isaacman said in a social media post on Saturday that they have a target date, but they “still have a lot to get through with development and training.” The Polaris Dawn website stated that the mission is set for “no earlier than early 2024.”

We have a target date, but still a lot to get through with dev and training. Qualification & acceptance tests on hardware w/ probably the biggest milestone the EVA suit ATP's. We are getting much closer.

— Jared Isaacman (@rookisaacman) January 27, 2024

Isaacman and Poteet will spend about five days on orbit for this free-flying mission with their two crew mates, Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis and Mission Specialist/Medical Officer Anna Menon. All four were connected through their work on the Inspiration4 mission before they became a crew on Polaris Dawn.

“Sarah Gillis was a lead astronaut trainer for that program. So, we got very close over six months,” Isaacman said. “She was the ‘core,’ so she was the first voice we heard when we strapped into Dragon and the voice we heard going all the way up to space. So, a lot of trust there.” 

“Anna Menon is a lead mission director at SpaceX. She runs Mission Control,” he added. “She was assigned to our families, to be the one to translate the good and, if necessary, the bad news to them. That’s a position of a lot of trust. And then obviously, Kidd was the mission director on it.”

During the mission, the four-member crew will conduct 38 experiments from 23 institutions from around the world in addition to raising funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The other two benchmarks of success for this flight include taking the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to a higher orbit than any previous Dragon mission as well as using the Starlink internet constellation to demonstrate laser-based communications while on orbit.

In a series of social media updates on Friday and Saturday, Isaacman answered some questions from the public about the progression of the suit development and the mission overall. He stated that over the past week, they “spent a lot of time pressurized in the EVA suits working contingencies.”

Isaacman clarified as well that, unlike missions to the International Space Station chartered by either NASA or Axiom Space, the crew members of the Polaris Dawn mission won’t launch and land while wearing IVA suits. He said because they are limited with space on this flight, they will only have their EVA suits.

In his conversation with Spaceflight Now, he added that their ride to space and back, the Crew Dragon Resilience, will have some extra demands placed on it to support the planned spacewalk.

“It’s not an airlock that has to be qualified to vacuum, it’s the entire spaceship that has to be done,” Isaacman said. “You’re also going to be using consumables at a substantially higher rate than you were before because you’re using oxygen for cooling. So, you need a lot more tanks than a Dragon would typically be equipped for, plus, the air to re-pressurize it. So, a lot goes into that.”

He stated on social media that SpaceX and the Polaris Dawn team are “using the center pallet for additional tanks” to help bolster the redundancies of the Dragon’s environmental control and life support system (ECLSS).

“Wicked fast”

The development of extravehicular activity (EVA) suits is no small undertaking. NASA awarded contracts to both Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to develop suits that are suitable for deployment on the surface of the Moon and ones designed for operation outside of the ISS.

The EVA suits being developed by SpaceX will likely be closer to the variants used for work outside of the orbiting outpost. However, SpaceX has been extremely tight-lipped about their development.

Isaacman described the EVA suits as “heavier and bulkier” as compared to the IVA version he used during Inspiration4. However, he clarified that it’s because the EVA suit needs to support additional capabilities.

“The reality is that SpaceX’s pace of development on building an EVA suit is wicked fast right now. And you know, you start with an IVA suit that’s already certified, which is has, under pressure, very little mobility,” Isaacman said. “There’s no mechanical joints in it and it’s a last line of defense. You’re only using that if everything else around you in the spacecraft failed into an environment where you are throwing away all the safety of your spacecraft and all the redundancies that are built into it. And now all you have is a suit.”

SpaceX and the Polaris Dawn team have shared some images of the training process. Poteet said it’s been quite something to go through these paces compared to his prior training in the U.S. Air Force.

“You know, back in pilot training, we were still using devices and procedures that they were using in the 1950s, 60s, 70s,” Poteet said. “Here, they’re creating thee training devices to simulate something that’s very difficult to simulate: zero gravity, with certain harnesses and, you know, these different monster garage-type devices to offload some of the challenges associated with, you know, being at 1G trying to simulate this whole EVA.”

As of mid-December, Isaacman said they were about 70 percent of the way to their mission launch goal based off their starting point roughly two years ago. He said once SpaceX is able to bring its EVA suits online, that will be a big step forward in the company’s future celestial ambitions.

“This is important. They envision a future that’s more exciting, where people can journey among the stars. You’re going to need a lot of spacesuits,” Isaacman said. “They shouldn’t cost hundreds of millions. They should cost a lot less. They should be scalable.”

Learning from the past, preparing for the future

Isaacman’s latest updates on the Polaris Dawn mission come on Jan. 27, 57 years after the fire that killed Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee amid a pre-launch test for the Apollo 1 mission.

Sunday, Jan. 28, marks the 38th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

The team remains acutely aware of the risks of pushing the envelope with human spaceflight, which is why Isaacman said they try to keep the lessons of the past in the forefront of their minds.

“The early days of the space program with the cosmonauts and, you know, Ed White went through and other astronauts was like, I mean, their masks fogged over, they could barely get back into the Gemini spacecraft,” Isaacman said. “I mean, there is a lot of lessons that were learned that have to be applied to this suit. And [SpaceX has] done it incredibly fast with a lot of testing and development.”

Once they’re able to demonstrate the viability of the suits with the Polaris Dawn mission, Isaacman said the hope is to be able to support repairs and boosting the Hubble Space Telescope on the second Polaris Program mission.

“That’s in NASA’s hands to decide if they want us to touch their telescope. I’d say the risk/reward is pretty favorable for it, not to mention that it builds awesome capabilities for commercial space that’s going to be required for the future,” Isaacman said during a panel discussion at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference in December.

The third mission is slated to be the first crewed launch of a Starship rocket. Prospective dates for either of the two follow-up missions have not been made public.

In the meantime, Isaacman and Poteet both said they’re enjoying the ride so far and aren’t looking past this first mission.

“I absolutely love every moment that we’re training. You know, we get closer and closer to launch, so we achieve these milestones and it’s kind of like these holy shit moments when we’re in the capsule and we’re just like, wow, here’s the crew, this is where we are in this phase of flight. And it becomes more and more real. As we get closer to launch itself.”

Retired NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, Italian co-pilot Walter Villadei, European Space Agency astronaut Marcus Wandt of Sweden and Turkey’s Alper Gezeravci spent the afternoon rehearsing launch-day procedures aboard their crew Dragon spacecraft before departing the pad to clear the way for an engine test firing.

As few hours later, SpaceX engineers fired up the Falcon 9’s first stage engines to verify their readiness for blastoff. If all goes well, López-Alegría and his three crewmates will strap back in Wednesday for launch at 5:11 p.m. EST, kicking off an automated one-and-a-half-day rendezvous with the space station.

During a late Tuesday teleconference, officials said the rocket and spacecraft were ready to go after last-minute fixes for a parachute issue that cropped up after a recent cargo flight and work to replace connectors holding the Crew Dragon to the Falcon 9’s upper stage that did not appear to be torqued, or tightened, to specifications.

Few details were provided, but Benji Reed, SpaceX senior director of human spaceflight programs, said the work was done in “an abundance of caution” and “we’re ready to fly.”

It will be the third piloted flight to the station sponsored by Houston-based Axiom Space in an ongoing NASA-sanctioned program to increase private-sector utilization of the outpost. Axiom, in turn, is using the flights to gain the experience needed to launch and operate a commercial space station after the ISS is retired at the end of the decade.

López-Alegría, one of America’s most experienced astronauts, made three trips to space aboard NASA’s shuttle and once aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. After retiring from NASA, he went to work for Axiom and commanded the company’s first commercial mission to the ISS in April 2022. He is a citizen of both the United States and Spain.

His crewmates for the Ax-3 mission are all veteran European military pilots or flight engineers with extensive management experience. Wandt and Gezeravci are making their first space flight while Villadei participated in an up-and-down trip to the edge of space last year aboard Virgin Galactic’s winged sub-orbital spaceplane.

Assuming an on-time launch Wednesday, the Ax-3 fliers will dock with the space station early Friday, temporarily boosting the lab’s crew to 11. During their two-week stay, the Ax-3 fliers plans to carry out more than 30 experiments primarily devoted to learning more about the effects of weightlessness on a variety of physical and cognitive parameters.

“This … is the first all-European mission with four European astronauts representing their countries as well as the European Space Agency,” said Lucie Low, Axiom’s chief scientist.

“So we’re excited to be building on the successes of Ax-2 by continuing to expand the global microgravity research community and enabling new researchers from many countries to access microgravity for sometimes the first time.”

On a lighter note, the Italian company Barilla has provided ready-made pasta that will be heated up and taste tested, Axiom says, “as part of an effort to develop a broader range of tasty foods in space for future space travelers.”

Wednesday’s flight will be the 12th piloted trip to orbit by SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. NASA sponsored one piloted test flight and has so far sent seven long-duration crews to the station. SpaceX has launched two commercial flights to the ISS for Axiom and one Earth-orbit mission paid for by tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman.

For the third time, Axiom Space is preparing a charter mission to the International Space Station. The Ax-3 mission carries the distinction of featuring an all-European crew, with Commander Michael López-Alegría being a dual citizen of both the United States and Spain.

Following the Flight Readiness Review on Wednesday, the crew spoke about their upcoming mission amid their ongoing quarantine in Florida, which has been in place for a little over a week. They are set to launch to the ISS, on Wednesday, Jan. 17, at 5:11 p.m. EST (2211 UTC).

“I’m very proud to being leading this mission to the International Space Station. It’s important not just for the scientific research and technology demonstrations and outreach events we will do, but it’s a very important step towards Axiom Space having a commercial space station in orbit before the decade is out,” said López-Alegría.

The commander of the Ax-3 mission is returning to the station for the second time as both a mission commander and a private astronaut. He previously flew as a crew member on three Space Shuttle missions and Expedition 14 via Soyuz TMA-9.

The pilot of the mission, Walter Villadei, a colonel in the Italian Air Force and head of the ItAF’s U.S. office overseeing commercial spaceflight will be making his second flight onboard a U.S. spacecraft. He previously flew onboard the suborbital Virgin Galactic flight dubbed Unity 23.

Villadei will become just the second non-U.S. citizen to pilot a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, following the launch of the Crew-7 mission with European Space Agency astronaut and current ISS commander Andreas Mogensen in the pilot’s chair.

He also served as the backup pilot for John Shoffner on the Ax-2 mission last year and said being able to learn along side him was invaluable.

“He gave me some tips, especially to try to be focused on the screens and enjoy the flight. He’s been very, very professional. His flight was very smooth,” Villadei said. “It’s been a great privilege to be in training with him. So, I look forward to being as good a pilot as he was for Ax-2.”

One of the mission specialists onboard the flight, Alper Gezeravcı, will become the first Turkish astronaut to head to space. He noted that the mission comes during the centennial celebration for Türkiye.

“As the children of this nation, we have always been blocked with the limit of the sky that we could see with our bare eyes and now, this mission is opening that curtain all the way to the end and our path, our journey starting from this moment on,” Gezeravcı said. “This is the beginning of our next centennial future history that we will be really proud of.”

During their 14-day mission on board the space station, they will collectively perform more than 30 scientific experiments and more than 50 outreach events.

Marcus Wandt, an astronaut not only representing Sweden, but also the European Space Agency (ESA), said some of the work he’s most looking forward to includes experiments dealing with stem cells.

“We’re looking at how the stem cells are affected and their proliferation and how they’re diversified after and that effect after being in microgravity,” Wandt said. It’s been tried with sounding rockets in Sweden before and now we’re getting a longer exposure during this mission on the stem cells.”

In addition to the work, the astronauts are also bringing some small items of significance to themselves as well as the countries that they represent. Wandt said among his items will be a Nobel Prize medal.

“It shows the significance of innovation and dedication to science and knowledge progress. That’s an important part for me and that’s something I’m bringing,” Wandt said.

When #AX3 launches to the @Space_Station later this month, it'll carry multiple #lifescience investigations sponsored by the ISS National Lab. From #stemcells to #plantsinspace, this groundbreaking research is designed to make life better back on Earth: https://t.co/dhAGEaJpqT pic.twitter.com/XVgCzNlSgX

— ISS National Lab (@ISS_CASIS) January 11, 2024

What’s left before launch

Coming up next week on Monday, there will be a static fire test of the Falcon 9 rocket at historic Launch Complex 39. Earlier that day, the crew will do a test run of the launch day process in an event called a dry dress rehearsal.

The next day, leadership from Axiom Space, SpaceX and NASA will gather for the Launch Readiness Review, which will be followed by a pre-launch teleconference tentatively set for 8 p.m. EST (0100 UTC).

Heading into his sixth launch, and reflecting on a nearly 30-year career of spaceflight, López-Alegría said it is still a privilege each and every time he is able to journey into space and that the experience “never gets old.” For the foreseeable future, he and fellow former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will continue to command these private astronaut missions to the ISS.

“I think I have more appreciation with every launch that approaches. I think you put some of these things in the rear-view mirror and it helps you put them in perspective,” López-Alegría said. “The first time you go, you’re just sort of hanging on for dear life and enjoying the ride, but I think you appreciate each one a little bit more, especially when you realize just how rare an opportunity is.”

“So, I’m happy to keep doing this. Axiom would definitely like to continue doing private astronaut missions. We’ll probably have other commanders in the future, but as long as they ask me to fly, my hand will be raised.”

To prepare for the gravitational forces experienced on the journey to space, the #Ax3 crew had to take a spin in the centrifuge. This training helps ready the crew for the G-forces felt during launch and landing. pic.twitter.com/iMckFlRfRE

— Axiom Space (@Axiom_Space) January 6, 2024

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Spaceflight Now editor Stephen Clark spoke live to International Space Station astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur about their mission Friday.

NASA and Houston-based Axiom Space have signed a “mission order” setting the stage for four civilians to visit to the International Space Station early next year, the first fully commercial flight to the orbiting lab complex, agency managers said Monday.

Axiom’s “AX-1” mission and an upcoming charity-driven flight to low-Earth orbit, both aboard SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules, represent “a renaissance in U.S. human spaceflight,” said Phil McAlister, NASA’s director of commercial spaceflight development.

Including the anticipated certification of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and upcoming sub-orbital flights by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, “I think that’s the perfect word for what we’re experiencing,” he said of the growing commercial space market. “This is a real inflection point, I think, with human spaceflight.”

Axiom Space, led by Mike Suffredini, NASA’s former space station program manager, announced last year that it plans to launch a four-man crew to the space station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The launch currently is targeted for the January timeframe.

Axiom Vice President Mike Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut and space station commander, will serve as commander of the AX-1 mission, expected to last about 10 days. Joining him will be Larry Connor, an American entrepreneur, Canadian investor and philanthropist Mark Pathy and Israeli investor Eytan Stibbe, a former fighter pilot.

Lopez-Alegria told reporters Monday the crew will participate in centrifuge training and flights to simulate weightlessness starting next week, followed by a camping trip to Alaska in July for “bonding and leadership training.”

Lopez-Alegria and Connor, the mission pilot, will begin SpaceX flight training shortly thereafter before the entire crew begins space station familiarization at the Johnson Space Center in October.

“We acknowledge the responsibility of setting the bar for future private missions and we embrace that challenge,” said Lopez-Alegria. “They’re not interested in being tourists. They want to do their part to improve humankind … through scientific experimentation and outreach to educational and philanthropic organizations.”

The flight will be the second fully commercial launch of civilians to low-Earth orbit. In September, SpaceX plans to launch four civilians aboard a Crew Dragon capsule in a flight benefitting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The two-man two-woman crew, chartered by billionaire Jared Isaacman, will orbit the planet for three days or so before returning to an ocean splashdown. Axiom’s AX-1 mission will be the second all-civilian flight to low-Earth orbit but the first to visit the International Space Station.

“Since it is the first and we’ve never done this before, we are going to learn as we go. I’m sure we’re going to have some hiccups and we’re going to have to make some adjustments and some lessons learned,” McAlister said. “But I think with the signing of this mission order, we’ve achieved a pretty significant milestone.”

Suffredini said the AX-1 mission is the first step toward the company’s goal of eventually operating a space station of its own after NASA’s lab is retired.

“This really is the beginning of a number of flights that really lead to the ultimate goal of having a commercially available low-Earth-orbit platform to not only help grow the LEO economy, but to be able to just serve all humanity,” he said. “It’s a tremendous step forward.”

In a bid to open up the station for more commercial use, NASA managers are planning on up to two “private astronaut missions,” or PAMs, per year, based on the availability of docking ports and government traffic to and from the lab complex.

The cost of transportation to low-Earth orbit, whether aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon or Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, will be up to the commercial entity sponsoring the flight. Prices for commercial launches are not known, but seats are expected to sell for at least $50 million each given the cost of the rocket and crew capsule, pre-launch training and support and crew recovery at the end of the flight.

For its part, NASA will require up to $4.8 million per flight for mission planning and execution, space-to-ground communications and use of NASA-provided equipment. The base cost of support from the station’s professional crew members will run $5.2 million per mission.

Other costs include $2,000 per day per crew member for food, up to $1,500 per person, per day for clothing, hygiene products, sleeping bags and other supplies and up to $164,000 per person, per day, to cover the cost of pre-staging food and crew provisions, as well as for disposal of any unused items.

Axiom is not paying list price for the AX-1 mission, in part because planning began before the new price guidelines were determined and because the company will be providing services to NASA that the agency would otherwise have to pay for. The mission order announced Monday covers just $1.69 million. Additional agreements remain to be negotiated.

“Axiom is obtaining services from NASA, such as crew supplies, cargo delivery to space, storage and on-orbit resources for daily use,” said Angela Hart, manager of commercial low-Earth orbit development at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “NASA’s purchasing cold stowage return capability from Axiom to return scientific samples to researchers on the ground.”

But, she added, “there are a multitude of other additional reimbursable Space Act Agreements that Axiom and SpaceX have with NASA that have other contract values.”

“Those include training services, as well as launch services at the Cape and other items that we’re still negotiating,” Hart said. “So that is not the full value of all the services that Axiom is responsible for.”

Given the extreme costs of transportation, NASA and Axiom acknowledge private spaceflight will remain the exclusive domain of wealthy adventurers, entrepreneurs and company-sponsored researchers, at least in the near term. But Suffredini said “you have to start somewhere,” and Lopez-Alegria said costs will eventually come down.

“It’s true that right now, it’s not very democratic, you have to be in a pretty select demographic to be able to afford it,” said Lopez-Alegria. “But … we’re all working to get the prices to come down. And I think if you follow the trend of costing, for example, commercial aviation, or pretty much any mode of transportation, they all start out high and come down.

“And so the experience that these folks will come away with, combined with the significant means of influence that they have at their disposal, I think is a win-win and sets us on a good course for the future.”

Four astronauts strapped into their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged to a fiery pre-dawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday, closing out the first operational flight of SpaceX’s futuristic touch-screen ferry ship.

Crew-1 commander Michael Hopkins, along with NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, disconnected from the space-facing port of the station’s forward Harmony module at 8:35 p.m. EDT Saturday.

That set up only the second piloted water landing for NASA’s post-shuttle commercial crew program and just the third night splashdown in space history — the first in nearly 45 years.

But the Crew Dragon executed a textbook return to Earth, dropping out of orbit, deploying four big parachutes and settling to a gentle splashdown south of Panama City, Florida, at 2:56 a.m.

“Dragon, on behalf of NASA and the SpaceX teams, we welcome you back to planet Earth, and thanks for flying SpaceX,” the company’s capsule communicator radioed. “For those of you enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you’ve earned 68 million miles on this voyage.”

“It is good to be back on planet Earth,” Hopkins replied. “And we’ll take those miles. Are they transferrable?”

“And Dragon, we’ll have to refer you to our marketing department for that policy.”

Despite the dead-of-night landing, NASA’s WB-57 tracking aircraft captured spectacular infrared views of the capsule as it descended through the dense lower atmosphere while cameras aboard SpaceX’s recovery ship showed the moment of splashdown.

SpaceX crews rushed to the Crew Dragon to secure the spacecraft and haul it on board a company recovery ship. The astronauts remained inside, waiting for the capsule to be hauled aboard where personnel were standing by to help them get out, on stretchers, as they begin re-adjusting to gravity after five-and-a-half months in space.

Following medical checks and phone calls home to friends and family, all four crew members were to be flown to shore by helicopter and handed off to NASA personnel for a flight back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

While mission managers prefer daylight landings, rough weather ruled out re-entry plans Wednesday and Saturday but with mild winds expected early Sunday, NASA and SpaceX agreed to target a pre-dawn return for the Crew-1 astronauts.

“Night landing? At Sea? Good thing there is a Naval Aviator on board! You got this “@AstroVicGlover!!!” tweeted astronaut Nick Hague, noting Glover’s experience as a Navy F/A-18 carrier pilot. “Soft landings to the Crew of Resilience.”

https://twitter.com/AstroHague/status/1388660608728551424

Unlike the first piloted Crew Dragon splashdown last August, when boaters enjoying a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Gulf quickly surrounded the spacecraft, the Coast Guard planned to enforce a 10-mile-wide safety zone this time around to keep any early morning onlookers well away.

The Crew Dragon’s return will complete a record-pace crew rotation requiring two launches and two landings with four different spacecraft over just three weeks to replace the International Space Station’s entire seven-member crew.

On April 9, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft carried Oleg Novitskiy, Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei to the station after a launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They replaced another Soyuz crew — Sergei Ryzhikov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Kate Rubins — who returned to Earth on April 17.

Then, on April 24, a Crew Dragon brought Crew-2 commander Shane Kimbrough, Megan McArthur, European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Japanese flier Akihiko Hoshide to the station. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that launched them the day before also helped launch Hopkins and company, the crew they are replacing aboard the station.

After helping the Crew-2 astronauts settle in aboard the lab complex, Hopkins, Glover, Walker and Noguchi, who arrived at the station last November 16, bid their seven ISS crewmates farewell Saturday evening and floated into their own Crew Dragon for undocking.

After moving a safe distance away, the ship’s flight computer was programmed to fire the ship’s braking thrusters for about 16-and-a-half minutes starting at 2:03 a.m. Sunday.

Moving through space at more than 17,100 mph — more than 83 football fields per second — the rocket firing was designed to slow the Crew Dragon by just 258 mph or so, just enough to drop the far side of the orbit into the dense lower atmosphere on a path targeting the Gulf of Mexico landing zone.

Protected by a high-tech heat shield, the Crew Dragon was expected to slam into the discernible atmosphere around 2:45 a.m., rapidly decelerating in a blaze of atmospheric friction.

Once out of the plasma heating zone, the spacecraft’s parachutes were to unfurl, allowing the ship to settle to a relatively gentle impact in the Gulf.

The most recent previous nighttime water landing came in October 1976 when two cosmonauts in a Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft, making an unplanned descent in blizzard-like conditions after a failed docking, were blown off course into a large lake in Kazakhstan. It took recovery crews nine hours to move the spacecraft to shore and rescue the cosmonauts.

The only other night splashdown came in December 1968 when the crew of Apollo 8, coming home from a Christmas trip around the moon, carried out a planned, uneventful pre-dawn landing in the Pacific Ocean.