Axiom, alongside Nasa and other industry players, has hailed the launch as a “turning point” in the latest expansion of commercial space ventures, collectively referred to by insiders as the low-Earth orbit economy: “LEO economy” for short.
Weather permitting, Axiom’s four-man team will lift off on Friday (8 April) at the earliest from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They will rise atop a Falcon 9 rocket furnished and flown by Elon Musk’s commercial space launch venture SpaceX.
“It is the beginning of many beginnings for commercialising low-Earth orbit,” Axiom’s co-founder and executive chairman, Kam Ghaffarian, told Reuters in an interview. “We’re like in the early days of the internet, and we haven’t even imagined all the possibilities, all the capabilities, that we’re going to be providing in space.”
The launch was initially scheduled for Wednesday 6 April, but an Axiom spokesperson said on Monday (4 April) that the delay will give SpaceX more...