The final commercial frontier - 13th April 2022

The first fully private mission to the International Space Station has entered orbit. A SpaceX Dragon module carried a four person crew from start-up company Axiom Space. The mission itself is a partnership between Axiom Space, Elon Musk's company SpaceX, and NASA.

Commanding Axiom's Ax-1 mission is former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria. The dual citizen of Spain and the US has already flown four previous space missions. He's joined by three paying crew mates: American real estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian investor and philanthropist Mark Pathy, and Israeli former fighter pilot and investor Eytan Stibbe.

It's widely rumoured that tickets for the 8 day stay aboard the International Space Station went for around $55 million. Nevertheless, these paying crew aren't merely floating around taking selfies. Instead, they're carrying out 25 research projects, one of which requires a trial of self-assembling tiles for space architecture. Another concerns growing micro cancer tumours to help in the early identification of the disease.

They'll be working alongside the regular space station crew, which includes three Americans, one German and three Russians.

Axiom's planning construction of its own commercial space station, which will decouple from the International Space Station before it deorbits in the 2030s.