We are in January 2031, the International Space Station (ISS) is living its last hours. After thirty years of rotation around the Earth, this ship which has welcomed on board hundreds of astronauts from nineteen countries is “desorbed”, a modest way of saying that it is sent back into the atmosphere to disintegrate. Fragments of these 400 tons plunge to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, at Nemo point, the place on the globe farthest from any emerged land. This is the end of this international laboratory built by NASA, with the help of major European, Russian, Canadian and Japanese agencies, and which cost 150 billion dollars (135.7 billion euros).
And yet, in this same place, another station will take over, but this time it is an entirely private installation, designed by the American start-up Axiom Space, which will then be detached from the ISS. . Six years earlier, in 2025, like the cuckoo clock, modules from this set will be added to the international vessel, thus constituting the first commercial space station in low orbit 400 kilometers from the Earth. With the particularity of having a hotel for tourists and spaces rented to researchers or companies wishing to conduct scientific experiments in a microgravity environment.
While waiting for this fiction to become reality, the firm of Houston (Texas) carried out, in 2022, a first private mission in the ISS, with a few handpicked customers, at the following an agreement with NASA. This approval is all the easier to obtain since the co-founder and director of the company, Michael Suffredini, worked in this American agency where he was for ten years, from 2005 to 2015, responsible for the ISS program, before launching the following year, his start-up.
Stay of ten days
The second mission began Sunday, May 21, at 5:37 p.m. (11:37 p.m. Paris time), when a Space X Falcon rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying the Dragon spacecraft. On board, a crew of four, a former NASA astronaut, program manager, an American businessman and racing champion, who will pilot the spacecraft to the ISS, and two Saudi astronauts – a man, a woman – for a ten-day stay. This launch, like the previous one, is carried out without too much publicity. Nothing to do with the exuberance of the two billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, when, in the summer of 2021, they competed to be the first to send passengers into space.
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