The last orbital tourist flight to launch from the United States, Inspiration4, was chartered by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who decided to give opportunities to three people who never could have afforded the trip for themselves. By contrast, each of Axiom’s space travelers is paying his own way.
Larry Connor, managing partner of the Connor Group, a firm in Dayton, Ohio, that owns and operates luxury apartments;
Mark Pathy, chief executive of Mavrik Corporation, a Canadian investment company;
And Eytan Stibbe, an investor and former Israeli Air Force pilot.
The three did not know one another previously.
While earlier private travelers to the space station were accompanied by professional Russian astronauts, the Axiom-1 mission is “very different in that the entire crew are unaffiliated with any government,” Derek Hassmann, the operations director at Axiom, said.
The commander of the space station trip will be Michael López-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut who is now a vice president at Axiom. Mr. López-Alegría flew on three space shuttle missions and then served as space station commander from September 2006 to April 2007.
“When I left NASA 10 years ago, I became a very strong advocate for and believer in commercial spaceflight in general and commercial human spaceflight in particular,” Mr. López-Alegría said during a news conference last month.
Mr. Connor’s previous exploits include a journey in a deep-sea submersible to the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean, more than 35,000 feet below the surface in the Mariana Trench; aerobatic flying competitions; and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.
During the news conference, Mr. Connor objected to being called a space tourist.
“The space tourists, they’ll spend 10 or 15 hours training five to 10 minutes in space,” he said. “And by the way, that’s fine. In our case, depending upon our role, we’ve spent anywhere from 750 to over 1,000 hours training.”
Mr. Connor also pointed to the scientific experiments that he and his crewmates will be conducting.
Mr. Pathy is also chairman of the board for Stingray Group, a media and entertainment company based in Montreal, and serves on the boards of several charitable organizations. “I always wanted to go to space as a child,” he said. “It was always an unachievable fantasy.”
A friend of Mr. Pathy’s told him about the Axiom private spaceflight missions. “That conversation challenged me to actually make that dream a reality,” he said.
Mr. Stibbe founded Vital Capital, a private equity fund that aims to improve housing, water, electricity and health care in developing countries while earning money for investors. He knew Ilan Ramon, another Israeli Air Force pilot who became an astronaut and who died when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated when returning to Earth in 2003.
“He was a good friend,” Mr. Stibbe said. “He was my commander in the squadron. And I had the opportunity to visit him during his training.”
Mr. Stibbe said he would be continuing an experiment that Mr. Ramon started involving the observation of thunderstorms. He will also take some pages of a diary that Mr. Ramon had kept while in orbit in Columbia and which were later found on the ground.
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