The four crew members – Michael Lopez Allegria, a former NASA astronaut turned Axiom employee who leads the mission; Israeli businessman Eitan Stibi. Canadian investor Mark Pathy; Ohio real estate mogul Larry Connor left the space station aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Sunday at 9:10 p.m. EDT. But as has already happened so often with this mission, there was another delay, as the capsule departed 15 minutes later than its original planned departure time of 8:55 PM EST, as the capsule’s occupants dealt with minor communications issues.
They will spend one free day flying through orbit before re-entering the atmosphere and parachuting into a landing gear off the coast of Florida around 1 p.m. ET on Monday.
For each mission, obtaining the necessary support from NASA astronauts will cost commercial customers $5.2 million, and all mission support and planning that NASA lends is another $4.8 million. While in space, food alone costs an estimated $2,000 per day per person. Getting supplies to and from the space station for a commercial crew is $88,000 to $164,000 per person, per day.
But the additional days the AX-1 crew spent in space due to weather won’t add to their personal total price, according to a NASA statement.
“Knowing that ISS mission objectives such as the recent Russian spacewalk or weather challenges could lead to delays in ship docking, NASA negotiated the contract with a strategy that did not require reimbursement for additional delays in undocking,” the statement read. “.
But the AX-1 is the first mission with A crew composed entirely of private citizens with no active members of a government space corps accompanies them in the capsule during the flight to and from the International Space Station. It is also the first time that ordinary citizens have traveled to the International Space Station aboard a US-made spacecraft.