The Space Station's First All-private Astronaut Crew Is Preparing to Return Home

The Axiom astronauts were secured inside the capsule with the hatch to the station closed soon before 7:30 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT), according to a live NASA Webcast.

If all goes according to plan, the Dragon capsule, called Endeavour, will parachute into the Atlantic off the Florida coast on Monday at approximately 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT).

Due to severe weather conditions at the splashdown zone, the journey home was delayed several days, extending the Axiom crew's stay in orbit well past its original departure date early last week.

The multinational team was directed by veteran NASA astronaut and Axiom vice president for business development Michael Lopez-Alegria, 63. Larry Connor, 72, an Ohio-based technology entrepreneur and aerobatics aviator designated as mission pilot, was his second-in-command.

Eytan Stibbe, 64, an investor and former Israeli fighter pilot, and Mark Pathy, 52, a Canadian businessman and philanthropist, completed the Ax-1 crew as mission specialists.

They spent two weeks aboard the ISS with the space station's seven regular, government-paid crew members: three American astronauts, a German astronaut, and three Russian cosmonauts.

The Axiom four became the first all-commercial astronaut team to launch to the space station, bringing equipment for two dozen science experiments, biomedical research studies, and technology demonstrations to be conducted in orbit.

Axiom NASA and SpaceX have hailed the trip as a watershed moment in the expansion of privately funded space-based trade, dubbed the "low-Earth orbit economy" or "LEO economy" for short by industry insiders.

Ax-1 is SpaceX's sixth human spaceflight in nearly two years, following four NASA astronaut trips to the International Space Station and the September Inspiration 4 flight, which launched an all-civilian crew into Earth orbit for the first time, though not to the space station.

Elon Musk's private rocket business, SpaceX, has been hired to fly three further Axiom crew flights to the International Space Station over the next two years. The cost of such expeditions continues to be prohibitively expensive.

According to Mo Islam, head of research at investment firm Republic Capital, which owns investments in both Axiom and SpaceX, Axiom charges clients between $50 million and $60 million per seat.

Additionally, NASA selected Axiom in 2020 to build a new commercial addition to the space station, which has been run for more than two decades by a US-Russian-led partnership of 15 countries. The Axiom module is expected to eventually replace the ISS once the rest of the space station is decommissioned around 2030.