So Friday morning I set an alarm for 6am, which if you know me at all is basically a war crime I committed against myself, because Axiom Space had a launch window at 11:17am Eastern and I wanted to actually watch it live instead of catching the recap three hours later like a normal person with boundaries.
Quick catch-up if you missed it: Ax-1 is Axiom Space's first mission, and it's the first fully private crewed flight to the International Space Station, ever. Not "private company launches astronauts for NASA" like the Crew Dragon flights we've had since 2020. This one's paying customers, full stop. Four seats, one of them Michael López-Alegría (a genuinely accomplished former NASA astronaut who's now VP at Axiom and flew as commander), and three guys who are there because they wrote a check. Larry Connor, a real estate guy from Ohio. Mark Pathy, a Canadian investor. Eytan Stibbe, an Israeli businessman and former fighter pilot. Reported price per seat: $55 million. For eight days. Do the math on that and it's more per day than most people's houses cost, which is the kind of detail I can't stop chewing on even though I know it's not really news, it's just how this works now.
They flew on Endeavour, the same Crew Dragon capsule that carried Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS back in May 2020 for Demo-2 — the flight that got American astronauts back to American soil for launches after almost a decade of buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. I remember writing about Demo-2 on here at the time, genuinely misty about it, and now the same hardware is ferrying a real estate investor to low Earth orbit less than two years later. That's the part that actually gets me, more than the launch itself. Reuse used to be the impressive part of this whole SpaceX story and now it's just logistics.
Falcon 9 lifted off from Pad 39A at Kennedy on schedule, which still amazes me every single time given how many decades that pad spent throwing Saturn Vs and Shuttles into the sky. Docking with the ISS happened the next morning, April 9th, a little after 8:30am. I did not get up for that one. There's a limit.
I'll be honest, I go back and forth on how I feel about "private astronaut" as a job description that now exists. Part of me thinks this is exactly what needs to happen for spaceflight to stop being a nation-state prestige project and start being infrastructure — cheaper access, more flights, more data, eventually (maybe) prices that aren't insane. The other part of me looks at $55 million a seat and thinks this is just first class on an airline nobody else can afford to fly, dressed up in a jumpsuit with a mission patch. Both things can be true. Connor and Stibbe are apparently doing actual research up there, dozens of experiments between the three paying crew, so it's not purely a joyride. Axiom's been pretty insistent about that in the run-up. I believe it's not purely a joyride. I also believe if I had $55 million lying around I'd absolutely call it a vacation to my friends even while filling out the research logs.
Meanwhile, obviously, the other thing everyone's been glued to this week is the whole Twitter/Elon Musk mess: the stake, the board seat, all of it moving fast enough that whatever I type here will probably be stale before I hit publish. I'm not touching that one today. Every tech site on the internet has three headlines about it already and I don't have anything to add that isn't just noise.
Anyway. NASA TV's stream still looks like it's from 2011, somehow, blocky graphics and all, and I mean that as an actual complaint, not a bit. SpaceX's own launch broadcasts have spoiled me completely and now going back to the old-school feel feels like a downgrade every time. Endeavour's supposed to come back down in a week or so, splashdown off the Florida coast, weather depending. I'll probably set another alarm. I regret nothing, my coffee was cold, and honestly it was worth it.