Roll up for Axiom’s $55 million space holiday

All you’ll need to enjoy this womb with a view is a strong stomach — there’s a good chance you’ll feel space sick for the first couple of days up there — and $55 million. That will be the price for a ten-day sojourn at Axiom Station, a privately funded space station that its architects hope will be a commercial successor to the International Space Station (ISS), which is expected to be retired in a few years.

A handful of tourists have been to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz rocket, but after decades of talk the race is finally on to make the final frontier the world’s most exclusive package-tour destination. Competing projects are making ambitious claims about timings for the launch of day trips, space hotels and even out-of-this-world apartment blocks.

A battle of billionaires is under way to be the first to capture the market for those who crave a glimpse of space. Richard Branson’s attempt to send himself to the edge of space has been much delayed, among other things by the death of a pilot when a Virgin Galactic spaceship crashed during a test flight in 2014. In May he reassured the hundreds of people who have signed up for the $250,000 tickets, including Justin Bieber, Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio, that the inaugural passenger-carrying suborbital flight of Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, with him on it, will be in a matter of months.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, says that next year his Blue Origin space company will start selling tickets for suborbital flights on its six-seater New Shepard vehicles. Bezos’s re-usable rocket and capsule, which together look like a colossal phallus, are a treat for psychoanalysts. Last month Blue Origin released astonishing footage of a dummy, dubbed Mannequin Skywalker, flying in the capsule to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere and making a parachute-assisted landing in the high desert of west Texas.

These excursions are regarded by more ambitious would-be pioneers as entry-level space ventures because they offer only a few weightless minutes in space.

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who already flies cargo to the ISS and has a contract with Nasa to take passengers in the future, says that he has two tourists willing to pay for a week-long trip around the moon. That was supposed to be this year, but has been revised to next year at the earliest. He and Bezos want to see a lunar base built, and Musk wants to colonise Mars.

Musk is one of the candidates to provide transport to the ISS for Axiom, which plans to start taking tourists to the station in 2020. Axiom will then assemble the modules of its own space station while connected to the ISS, before it eventually goes into orbit as its own entity.

Axiom Space wants its station to be used for research and other commercial enterprises in addition to tourism, and has experience on its side. It was set up by Michael Suffredini, a former Nasa manager of the ISS.

Axiom Space founder Mike Suffredini, left, with designer Philippe Starck

NEW YORK TIMES/ REDUX/ EYEVINE

There will be room for eight crew on the station, including two professional astronauts. Those making up the crew list will mostly be billionaires looking for experiences that few others have had. Despite some luxurious touches they will have to deal with the realities of vacuum toilets and no showers on board and undertake several weeks of training.

Suffredini claims that he is trying to awaken the social consciences of those who have the resources to change the world. Although he hasn’t been into space, he knows many who have. “All come back with this sense of this fragile planet out there. It’s been described by almost everybody as a perspective-altering experience, almost a religious experience to be in the heavens looking down on your planet. You have to experience that to get this emotional push and change your perspective and say, ‘Hey, what can I do to help?’ ”

He says that he has received letters of intent from wealthy individuals and hopes that they will begin to be signed up once there have been successful flights by the delivery vehicle. That could be a SpaceX or Boeing rocket.

A rival to Axiom is Orion Span, also based in Houston, Texas, which claims that it is on schedule to host the first guests in orbit at its Aurora Station in 2022. “We recognise that goal may seem optimistic,” the company’s chief executive, Frank Bunger, says, but he insists that the company has developed proprietary technology that simplifies the design and manufacture of its station.

The cost of a trip starts at $9.5 million, which includes getting to the station. The ISS charged its tourists between $20 million and $40 million. “Now Axiom wants to charge more. Isn’t the commercial space industry supposed to be cheaper, better, faster?” Bunger says.

Bunger promises that guests at his station “will enjoy the most pristine experience ever offered in space. For guests who travelled to the ISS, the environment had quite a bit of clutter, exposed cabling and a utilitarian design. We are laser-focused on the experience part of space travel, providing guests with the same luxuries of a fine hotel, while providing an authentic astronaut experience. A stay at Aurora Station will include the chance to enjoy a luxurious design, high-quality bedding, top-notch [space] food, views that will blow your mind and a modern, private suite.”

A typical day might involve training on the systems, growing food in zero gravity, which you will be able to take home, observational work and communicating with family and friends down below. Isn’t all this a massive distraction from the serious business of space science? “I would argue the reverse,” Bunger says. “By having a permanent foothold in space we make science and exploration more accessible and much more affordable.

“Orion Span’s mission is to build and sustain human communities in space [and] to make space visitation routine and exciting. We’re aiming to make serious inroads into making long-term colonisation of space viable.”

The plan is to eventually construct a cluster of capsules so that the super-rich will be able to buy or rent space condos. “Like the expansion westward in the United States in the 1800s, we believe that there has to be a profit motive to drive people to go to space,” Bunger says. “By selling capacity we enable possibilities of using the space to run a business, invest or, one day, potentially living there.”

A mock up of a glowing padded cabin

A ten-day trip to space shouldn’t be too taxing for a fit person, although many will feel nauseous for the first two or three days before they get their “space legs”. Monica Grady, the professor of planetary and space science at the Open University, warns of the perils of spending too long in a space timeshare. “If you are going to have a condominium in space there will be real health problems,” she says. “You will start losing calcium from your bones, your heart will go a funny shape and your blood won’t circulate.” However, she is confident that science will eventually find ways to keep humans healthy in space.

Space tourism can be complementary to the serious business of science, Grady believes, and is an important source of creating jobs in the industry. However, she is sceptical of the argument that Axiom and Aurora would be providing a service to humanity by taking impressionable billionaires up there.

“If it is used in an inspirational way to make people realise that we are just a very small body and we need to be a jolly sight more careful with it, that might be an incredibly powerful message,” she says. “However, you could argue that the $50 million to get up there, just so you can see the curvature of the Earth and feel awed, would probably be better spent on healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Simon Drake, the director of Space Ventures Investors Limited, gives advice to those wanting to put money into the space industry. He is not convinced that we will see private space stations open to tourists in four or five years, as the companies have claimed. “It sounds ambitious and it is,” he says. Starck’s designs and computer-generated images of floating space tourists serve one purpose at this stage. “It is about headline grabbing, and headline grabbing is all about the first orders,” Drake says. “The first orders put a floor underneath the business model.

“Launch is the bottleneck. You can send up satellites on rockets and something blows up and no one cares, except the shareholders. But you send up three tourists who are paying $40 million a pop and something goes wrong . . . It’s not game over, but it’s not good.”

A safer bet for investors, Drake suggests, are Earth-observation satellites. Yet with billionaires in the space race alongside the Chinese government, which is developing a spacecraft to take tourists on suborbital journeys, and small companies such as Spain’s Zero 2 Infinity, which hopes to lift people to near-space with helium balloons, space tourism may be inching closer to viability.

The Space Industry Act was passed earlier this year, paving the way for the first British space port. Initially that will be for launching satellites, but Libby Jackson, the human space flight and microgravity programme manager at the UK Space Agency, says it is an important step and if the demand is there, commercial space flight will become a reality. “When I talk to schoolchildren I say, ‘If you want to go into space in your lifetime, I think you will, though you will have to start saving early and save a lot.’ It is not going to be peanuts, not Easyjet levels, but it will be affordable.”

Suffredini would visit his Axiom space station “in a heartbeat”, but admits that the small matter of finding the $55 million fee makes that unlikely. By sending others up there, he hopes that space tourism can have a role in our future. “The survival of our species really has to do with pioneering. In order to do sustained exploration we have to have a vehicle to do all the work. We have to make orbit our next frontier and as a species learn to live not just on this planet, but in space.”
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