“What do you hope to accomplish in the next 10 years?” is a familiar question, one often asked at job interviews or when starting a new company.
Axiom Space was founded in 2016, so it’s coming up on that 10-year mark — and the Houston-based company has already checked off a lot of boxes that were likely on its milestone list.
For example, Axiom has organized three all-private crewed missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and obtained a NASA contract to send the first commercial module to the ISS. The company is also building the spacesuits that NASA’s Artemis astronauts will use during their exploration of the lunar surface.
Related: NASA’s Artemis program: Everything you need to know
“The biggest points of excitement for me are the missions, the spacesuit and the station,” Tejpaul Bhatia, chief revenue officer at Axiom Space, told Space.com during the 39th Space Symposium, which was held last month in Colorado Springs.
“The missions we’ve done — three over the last three years, we’ve sent eight countries to space,” Bhatia added. “We’ve worked with over 50 research and commercial partners who work across those missions, and we will be doing more. The next mission [to the ISS] will be coming up soon, and more nations and more companies will be part of those missions. The excitement and the outreach for reaching everyone to know about space — it’s a new era for space.”
At the beginning of this year, the company’s private Ax-3 mission made history as “the first all-European commercial astronaut mission” to the ISS. The 22-day Ax-3, Axiom’s longest mission yet, sent a citizen of Türkiye to space for the first time and allowed Italy to join with a new role with commercial spaceflight.
While on orbit, a new conjunction warning system developed by the Italian Air Force (ItAF) was used to monitor for possible collision threats. The Italian Space Operations Centre demonstration provided researchers with information that would allow crews to obtain near-real time collision warnings independently, without having to heavily rely on support from Earth. The team was also able to test out other tools that monitor solar activity and space weather.
“The most exciting part is to use all the heritage that Italy has gathered over the last 60 years to build up new bridges along with our national industries and trying to create some connection in between that…
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