▲ Earth orbiting international space station for space tourists to visit
Axium Space, an American space tourism company, has released a list of the first three private astronauts to visit the International Space Station ISS.
Each of them will pay about 60.6 billion won in our money and will visit ISS for a short term in SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule early next year.
They will stay on the ISS for 8 days and do scientific experiments.
Named'Ax-1 Mission', US real estate investment entrepreneur Larry Connor, Canadian financier Mark Passy, and Atan Steve, a former Israeli Air Force pilot, will participate in this visit. Is led as the spaceship commander.
Previously, 7 people had visited the ISS in a Russian Soyuz capsule, but the Ax-1 is the first time a space tourist recruited by a private enterprise visits the ISS in a rocket and spacecraft made by a private enterprise.
Axiom Space plans to arrange civilian ISS tours twice a year.
From 2024, we are also promoting plans to equip ISS with its own occupancy facilities.
'Virgin Galactic' by Richard Brands, president of Virgin Group and'Blue Origin' by Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, are also promoting paid space tours with the aim of starting within this year.
SpaceX is also promoting a plan to send four civilians to orbit with space tourism company'Space Adventure', but the timing is expected to be around 2022, which is later than Axiom.
(Photo = courtesy of NASA, Yonhap News)