Posted on 01/28/2021 5:18:01 AM PST by SmokingJoe
Axiom Space revealed the three private citizens who paid $55 million each to go to the International Space Station They are American real estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian investor Mark Pathy and Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe The mission will be led by a veteran NASA astronaut and is set to launch in January next year The first customers of commercial space travel have been revealed, and each paid a jaw-dropping amount for their trip to the International Space Station (ISS) early next year.
Axiom Space, the Houston, Texas-based aerospace company that arranged the trip, said the first fully private astronaut crew comprising American real estate and tech entrepreneur Larry Connor, Canadian investor Mark Pathy and Israeli businessman and former Israeli Air Force pilot Eytan Stibbe is heading to the ISS in January next year aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon, the Associated Press reported.
The three each paid $55 million to join the Ax-1 mission, which will be led by a veteran NASA astronaut now working for Axiom Space.
While "fee-paying" space tourists visiting the space station is nothing new, the upcoming mission will be the first time a commercially built astronaut capsule will be used on such trips, The Verge noted.
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Connor, president of real estate investment company The Connor Group, is 71 and is set to become the second-oldest person to go to space after John Glenn, who flew to space in 1998 at age 77. Meanwhile, Stibbe was a close friend of Ilan Ramon, Israel’s first astronaut. The latter was among the seven crew members who were killed in the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibtimes.com ...
When is Bozos going to Venus?
You couldn’t pay me enough to go to space, or to clim Mount Everest or to go in a submarine or to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.
Life is “thrilling” enough without all that thrill seeking.
Bozo is not going to Venus. We’ll package him and send him off on the next Parker Solar Probe to the sun, where he will subsequently congflagrate.
Works for me.
I would pay a million if I could be young and rich...
No not really, I’d suffer too much in the coming purge.
“three private citizens who paid $55 million each”
Folks the point you are missing is SpaceX just collected $165 million dollars from three guys that have a lot of money.
How much does it cost to get this rocket there and back?
How much PROFIT did SpaceX just make?
How many more billionaires want to do this?
SpaceX is making money sending satelites into orbit.
IF every time they send a rocket to the International Space station, they have 1-3 paying customers along for the ride , we are talking a very profitable enterprise.
While I am a great fan of SpaceX and its accomplishments, ALL previous capsules have been "commercially" built. NASA may build small bits of prototype hardware, but companies listed on the NYSE build the capsules under NASA contract.
Except for all the Soyuz trips. Not sure if they are on the NYSE.
/S
NASA builds Performance, Monitoring & Administrative Requirements, plus Testing Facilities, i.e. Bureaucracy.
We also have more specific figures available because Elon Musk revealed the marginal cost of launching a reused Falcon 9 in a May 2020 interview for Aviation Week (starting at 17:53). Marginal costs represent only the costs resulting from relaunching the Falcon 9 after its first mission is already done and paid for. According to Elon Musk, the marginal cost for a reused Falcon 9 launch is only about $15 million. He explained that the majority of this amount was represented by the $10 million it costs to manufacture a new upper stage. It is not reusable (and never will be), so it is necessary to make a new one for each launch. The remaining $5 million include costs of reusing the payload fairings (Musk probably only counts fairing refurbishment costs in this scenario because it costs $5–6 million to manufacture a new set of fairings), helium, fuel and oxygen, and also the cost of recovering the booster and fairings. Most importantly, the cost of refurbishing the recovered booster is only $250,000, according to Musk. That's a very low amount, which could indicate that the booster refurbishment process does not require much manpower, expensive hardware replacements or complex inspections.
https://www.elonx.net/how-much-does-it-cost-to-launch-a-reused-falcon-9-elon-musk-explains-why-reusability-is-worth-it/
How much PROFIT did SpaceX just make?
Quite a bit.
How many more billionaires want to do this?
Over 2,000 billionaires, not to mention thousands more who are nearly billionaires. You only need to be worth about $200/$300 million to be able to afford this.
As far as I can see, the only limitation right now is that the Space Station can only accommodate up to 7 people right now. And most of those slots are taken by governments and big corporations
Of course Musk could build his own Space Station soon. I wouldn't put it past him.
Wouldn’t it be cheaper and just as realistic to ride the Mission Space ride at Disney World and then you can go out and get a churro. What a waste both of money and this space to talk about these idiots. Tom Tusser and P T Barnum were right.
wy69
Its all (expensive) fun and games, until someone puts an eye out...
curmudgeon
[kəːˈmʌdʒ(ə)n]
NOUN
a bad-tempered person, especially an old one.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and just as realistic to ride the Mission Space ride at Disney World and then you can go out and get a churro. What a waste both of money and this space to talk about these idiots. Tom Tusser and P T Barnum were right.
No it wouldn't. Going into orbit requires speeds of up to 20 times the speed of sound. I have been on them Disney rides in Orlando. They don't even come close.
(If you just want to get into orbit around the Earth, you need to reach speeds of at least 4.9 miles per second, or about 17,600 miles per hour. If you want to completely escape Earth's gravity and travel to another moon or planet, though, you need to be going even faster - at a speed of at least 7 miles per second or about 25,000 miles per hour.)
Get him drunk put him in the old Disneyland rocket =PROFIT.
It seems this is going to be a very profitable ongoing venture.
“No it wouldn’t. Going into orbit requires speeds of up to 20 times the speed of sound. I have been on them Disney rides in Orlando. They don’t even come close.”
They also don’t smear your body all over the seat. I’ve been in a F15 at a few G’s and it was rough. A spacecraft leaving the surface of Earth, for example, needs to be going about 11 kilometers (7 miles) per second, or over 40,000 kilometers per hour (25,000 miles per hour), to enter orbit.
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Escape_Velocity.html
I, and a few in that list of people wanting to do this, am not young. It would take a trowel to put me back together again. I just can’t quite see why I should pay $55M to hammer myself to a seat.
wy69
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