Washington (AFP)

The training of the crew which will constitute in January the first entirely private mission to the International Space Station (ISS) is about to begin, announced Monday the company Axiom Space during a press conference joint with NASA. .

Four people are to be launched at the end of January aboard a rocket rented from another space company, SpaceX, for a mission called Ax-1 which will last about 10 days, including "seven or eight" in orbit, detailed Michael Suffredini, the Axiom Space boss.

On board: only one experienced astronaut, Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA who has been to the ISS, and three novices, American, Canadian and Israeli businessmen, who have never been to the ISS before. in the space.

They will operate in the American segment of the ISS, and intend to conduct scientific experiments there.

"We will start what can be called the actual training next week," including tests in a centrifuge simulating accelerations, said Michael Lopez-Alegria.

The four, who have only seen each other "a handful of times" so far because of the pandemic, will then go together "camping" in Alaska in July.

Full-time training will begin in August for Michael Lopez-Alegria, and in September for American Larry Connor, the mission pilot.

From October, they will be complete to train, mainly from Houston, Texas, on the systems of the ISS and the SpaceX spacecraft that will take them there, Dragon.

This includes things as basic as "how to use the toilet" or "the communication system," the astronaut detailed.

Axiom Space sees this mission as a "first step" towards its project to build the first commercial space station, which will initially be attached to the ISS.

Asked about the cost of Ax-1, the Ax-1 boss remained vague: "Numbers in the tens of millions have been widely discussed, and I will not attack them."

NASA announced in 2019 that it would welcome tourists to the ISS, from which it is seeking to disengage in order to focus on distant exploration.

A possibility opened up thanks to SpaceX, which, with its rockets, gave back to the United States the possibility of launching humans into space from their soil.

© 2021 AFP