Axiom Space plans to launch its fourth mission on Tuesday, June 10 – a mission that CEO Tejpaul Bhatia described as “a bit of a victory”.
In addition to being the fourth mission of the private space company at the International Space Station, Bhatia said that AX-4 would be the second “entirely national mission of Axiom Space where all customers are national governments. In fact, the company has also nicknamed this mission as the one that “will make the return” to human space flight for India, Poland and Hungary, which will each have an astronaut on theft.
In addition, Bhatia said it would be the company’s first “betting mission” after losing money on the first three. He stressed that these ISS missions are “not our business model” – the company plans to add commercial modules to the ISS which end up detaching and become the flying axiom.
At the same time, Bhatia said that these initial missions generated income and help illustrate the demand for commercial space theft. In addition, they create inspiring “Apollo moments” for each of the customer countries.
“This shows how space opens because of commercial companies,” he said. “For the three countries, it will be their second astronaut. And this shows the passage from Space Race 1.0 to Space Race 2.0. ”
Until now, Axiom Space’s missions have used space dragon spaces to bring astronauts to the ISS. The role of the company, said Bhatia, is to serve as an integrator and broker on the market which can bring these missions together. As the commercial space industry develops, he predicted that there will be huge opportunities to continue to serve as a “managed market” for space, because “no one can do it alone”.
“To become a multi-planetary, it is not something where a country has all the capacities,” he added.
The prospects for traveling in the commercial space have seemed less some in recent days, after the acrimony between President Donald Trump and the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, led Trump to declare that he cancels government contracts with Musk and Musk companies to answer that he declared the spatial dragon. (He seemed later to go back.)
Axiom Space refused to comment on how the Trump -Musk quarrel could affect industry, but when Bhatia and I spoke at the end of May, I asked her a related question about the political landscape – namely whether the potential budget cuts for NASA and more broadly through scientific research threatened the optimistic vision he presented.
“It is not that government investment will open the space,” said Bhatia. “They have already done so. [Now] It is the entrepreneurs who will use commercial platforms to build the bridge in the next stage. »»
The CEO is actually relatively new in its current role. When we talked, Bhatia told me that it was only his fourth week of work after replacing the company’s co-founder, Dr. Kam Ghaffarian, as general manager. (Ghaffarian continues to serve as executive president of the company.)
But Bhatia – who was previously executive by Google Cloud – had already spent four years as the company’s income director. Although his career was not particularly space -focused before joining Axiom Space, he said that he was younger, “when I dreamed, it was always space.”
And like any CEO of Good Space Company, Bhatia finally hopes to go to the frontier final itself.
“I would love to go,” he told me. “I have no doubt that we will all go.”
