Axiom Space plans to launch its fourth mission On Tuesday, June 10 – a mission that CEO Tejpaul Bhatia described as “a little of a winning lap.”
In addition to being the fourth mission of the private space company to the International Space Station, Bhatia said that AX-4 will be the second “fully national mission” of Axiom Space where all customers are national governments. In fact, the company also called this mission as one, which will “notice the return” to human spaceflight for India, Poland and Hungary, who will each have an astronaut during the flight.
In addition, Bhatia said this will be the company’s first to “break a mission” after losing money in the first three. He emphasized that these ISS missions are “not our business model”-the company plans to add business modules to the ISS, which eventually detects and become the free flying Axiom station.
At the same time, Bhatia said that these initial missions earn and help illustrate the demand for commercial space flight. Moreover, they create inspiring “Apollo moments” for each of the customer countries.
“It shows how space opens due to business companies,” he said. “For all three countries, this will be their second astronaut ever. And it shows the change of Space Race 1.0 to Space Race 2.0.”
To date, Axiom’s missions have used SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to bring astronauts to ISS. The role of the company, Bhatia said, is to serve as a “market integrator and broker”, which can join these missions. As the commercial space industry expands, he predicted that there will be huge opportunities to continue serving as the “managed market” for space, because “no one can do this alone.”
“To become multi-plane, this is not something where one country has all the skills,” he added.
The prospects for a commercial space travel looked less confident in the past days, after Acrimony between President Donald Trump and CEO of Spacex Elon Musk led Trump to declare that he canceled contracts with Musk and Musk companies to say he is rejecting the Dragon spacecraft. (He later seemed to go back.)
Axiom space refused to comment on how the Trump-Musk feud could influence the industry, but when Bhatia and I spoke in late May, I asked him a related question of the political landscape-name, or Possible budget cuts at NASA and wider Across scientific research threatened the optimistic vision he presents.
“It is not that government investment will open space,” Bhatia said. “They’ve already done it. [Now] It is the entrepreneurs who will use the trading platforms to build the bridge to the next stage. ”
The Director General is actually relatively new to his current role. When we spoke, Bhatia told me it was only his fourth week about the job Replacing the co-founder of the company Dr. Kam Ghaffarian as general manager. (Ghaffarian continues to serve as the company’s executive president.)
But Bhatia – who was previously an executive at Google Cloud – has already spent four years as the company’s chief income officer. While his career was not particularly space before joining Axiom Space, he said that since he was younger, “when I was noon, it was always about space.”
And as some general manager of a good space company, Bhatia has hopes to travel to the final limit itself.
“I would like to go,” he told me. “I have no doubt that we will all go.”
