SpaceX F9/Dragon : Axiom AX-1 Crewed Flight : 8 April 2022 (15:17 UTC)

[smoliarm]

...
Regulation and guidelines on this topic are governed at the international level by the UN's IAEA and the IRCP, ICAO and (UN)OOSA.

ok, three are simple:

UN's IAEA = International Atomic Energy Agency,
ICAO = International Civil Aviation Organization
UN)OOSA = United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs

but the fourth one ...

IRCP - ? ... International Research on Criminal Policy (IRCP) ...

May be you meant ICRP? = International Commission on Radiological Protection

----------------------------
It is always a good idea to give *translation* since a VAST majority here are not familiar with these abbreviations.

[Vultur]

No. They are subject to the same lifetime radiation limits set by the UN (UNSCEAR) and many aviation agencies in this case the FAA

OK, sois it not actually true that the FAA only regulates private spaceflight with regard to the risk to the uninvolved public?

NASA 2013 documentation placed the restriction that astronauts under its domain or apart of any US flight should not be exposed to more than 1,000 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation in a lifetime, which equals an exponential 5% increase in risk of developing a fatal cancer.

But I don't think NASA is a regulatory agency as such - how can they set limits for "any US flight" that is not a NASA flight?

Some part of my understanding must be wrong, if these regulations do apply, but which part?

[russianhalo117]

No. They are subject to the same lifetime radiation limits set by the UN (UNSCEAR) and many aviation agencies in this case the FAA

OK, sois it not actually true that the FAA only regulates private spaceflight with regard to the risk to the uninvolved public?

NASA 2013 documentation placed the restriction that astronauts under its domain or apart of any US flight should not be exposed to more than 1,000 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation in a lifetime, which equals an exponential 5% increase in risk of developing a fatal cancer.

But I don't think NASA is a regulatory agency as such - how can they set limits for "any US flight" that is not a NASA flight?

Some part of my understanding must be wrong, if these regulations do apply, but which part?

The limits are defined for them by the regulatory agencies and they are required to follow them. NASA is charged to follow these regulations and is subject to oversight. Foreigners on a US flight is subject to US rules as the spacecraft is US owned. in the case of Non NASA flights that use spacecraft that are built and registered in the US they are subject to the same the regulatory agencies rules. Astronauts follow the precedents set by the Aviation industry and agencies and those rules and guidelines are typically nearly the same across most countries. In international airspace and domains treaties and agreements for UN agencies are also in effect and the spacecraft's registered country remains primary for regulatory enforcement. the FAA is the main international standard for rules.

A comparison is the shipping and cruise line industry register there ships in other countries to avoid being subject to US regulations everywhere. It is rare to have US flagged ships in the Cruise and ferry industries.

I am not the best at explaining things. Read the PDF's and it will give you a better understanding. Your browsers search function can help you understand as well.

[Vultur]

Sure, I understand that SpaceX as an US company has to follow US regulations.

What isn't clear to me is what US government agency has the power to make those regulations. NASA isn't regulatory, and it's been repeatedly discussed in the context of e.g. Virgin Galactic that the FAA doesn't regulate risks to "spaceflight participants", only the uninvolved public.

But setting radiation limits would seem to be exactly that...

[mn]

A few random tidbits on the experiments planned on this flight.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/44-israeli-experiments-to-join-israels-next-astronaut-to-space-667270

44 Israeli experiments to join Israel's next astronaut to space

...Most of the experiments are not for space-related technologies, but will test conditions in space that may lead to technological, scientific, and medical breakthroughs...

https://vinnews.com/2021/05/06/2nd-israeli-astronaut-to-perform-44-experiments-in-outer-space-after-paying-55-million-dollars-for-his-ticket/

2nd Israeli Astronaut To Perform 44 Experiments In Outer Space – After Paying 55 Million Dollars For His Ticket
....
The bulk of Eytan’s time during this mission will be dedicated to conducting educational experiments in space. The experiments are based on suggestions by high school students, who are part of the Ramon Foundation program which encourages scientific projects on innovative matters related to cosmology, astrophysics, optics, medicine and engineering...

[gongora]

In today's ASAP meeting, they mentioned this is targeting January for an 8 day stay at ISS.

[AndrewRG10]

In today's ASAP meeting, they mentioned this is targeting January for an 8 day stay at ISS.

Damn, so we could have 6 manned crew dragon launches before Boeing sends a crewed mission up.

[russianhalo117]

In today's ASAP meeting, they mentioned this is targeting January for an 8 day stay at ISS.

Damn, so we could have 6 manned crew dragon launches before Boeing sends a crewed mission up.

We won't know the final answer until OFT-2 data review is complete and CFT is in the final portion of its flow..

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://twitter.com/nasaspaceflight/status/1390729025698603018

NASA and Axiom Space will host a teleconference with media on May 10 to discuss more details about the mission.

Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1), is scheduled to launch NET January 2022 for an eight-day mission aboard the ISS. The Axiom Space crew will launch on a SpaceX Dragon from 39A.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-axiom-space-to-host-media-briefing-on-private-astronaut-mission

May 7, 2021
MEDIA ADVISORY M21-058

NASA, Axiom Space to Host Media Briefing on Private Astronaut Mission

NASA and Axiom Space have signed a mission order for the first private astronaut mission to the International Space Station and will host a teleconference with media at 11 a.m. EDT on Monday, May 10, to discuss more details about the mission.

NASA has opened up the space station for commercial activities, including private astronaut missions, as part of its plan to develop a robust and competitive economy in low-Earth orbit. NASA’s needs in low-Earth orbit – such as human research, technology development, and in-flight crew testing – will continue after the retirement of the International Space Station. Commercial industry will help meet these needs by providing destinations and transportation capabilities to continue these services as part of a broader low-Earth orbit economy. Enabling private astronaut missions to the station is an important step to stimulate demand for commercial human spaceflight services so that NASA can be one of many customers in low-Earth orbit.

The spaceflight, named Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1), is scheduled to launch no earlier than January 2022 for an eight-day mission aboard the orbiting complex. The Axiom Space crew will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Teleconference participants are:

Phil McAlister, director, commercial spaceflight development, NASA Headquarters
Angela Hart, manager, commercial low-Earth orbit development, NASA’s Johnson Space Center
Dana Weigel, deputy manager, International Space Station, Johnson
Michael Suffredini, president and CEO, Axiom Space
Michael López-Alegría, vice president and Ax-1 commander, Axiom Space

Media may ask questions via phone only. For the dial-in number and passcode, please email Stephanie Schierholz no later than 10 a.m. Monday, May 10, at: [email protected]

For more than 20 years, NASA has supported a continuous U.S. human presence in low-Earth orbit. The agency's goal is a low-Earth orbit marketplace where NASA is one of many customers, and the private sector leads the way. This strategy will provide services the government needs at a lower cost, enabling the agency to focus on its Artemis missions to the Moon and on to Mars while continuing to use low-Earth orbit as a training and proving ground for those deep space missions.

For more information about NASA’s commercial low-Earth orbit economy effort, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/leo-economy/

-end-

[Jansen]

https://spacenews.com/nasa-increases-prices-for-iss-private-astronaut-missions/

The new pricing policy charges $5.2 million per person for ISS crew time to support a private astronaut mission, and $4.8 million per mission for integration and basic services, such as mission planning. The policy now charges between $88,000 and $164,000 per person per day for pre-staging food and other cargo on the station for those missions on NASA cargo vehicles and for disposing cargo on those spacecraft. It also charges between $40 and $1,500 per person per day for crew supplies and $2,000 per person per day for food.

Kinda goes with the previous post.

Edit:

The revised prices do not apply to the first private astronaut mission under the 2019 policy, the Ax-1 mission by Axiom Space. That Crew Dragon mission will fly three private customers and one Axiom professional astronaut to the station in early 2022. Both NASA and Axiom said that the agreement for that mission was signed under the original pricing policy, which remains in effect for that mission.

New policy conveniently goes into effect right after the AX-1 contract is signed.

[cpushack]

I wonder if costs can be offset if Axiom brings up some cargo for NASA (or removes some trash etc)?
Seems like upmass would be a great bartering item

[Jansen]

I wonder if costs can be offset if Axiom brings up some cargo for NASA (or removes some trash etc)?
Seems like upmass would be a great bartering item

However, the agency left open the door to negotiating those prices depending the specifics of the mission. “Due to the complexity of private astronaut missions and differing mission concepts, reimbursable values for these missions may vary,” the agency said, noting that detailed pricing “will be negotiated at time of mission award and contract or agreement finalization.”

Sure looks like it.

[TrevorMonty]

I wonder if costs can be offset if Axiom brings up some cargo for NASA (or removes some trash etc)?
Seems like upmass would be a great bartering item

However, the agency left open the door to negotiating those prices depending the specifics of the mission. “Due to the complexity of private astronaut missions and differing mission concepts, reimbursable values for these missions may vary,” the agency said, noting that detailed pricing “will be negotiated at time of mission award and contract or agreement finalization.”

Sure looks like it.

Freezer room science experiments is precious. I'd be surprised if Axiom weren't selling any spare capacity. Given they are only there for week, Dragon should be able to carry most of their supplies, unless NASA wants to trade that spare cargo space for supplies already on ISS. The trunk space is likely to be free.

The big benefit to ISS of these extra private missions is more opportunities for up and down mass.

What is the agreement between Axiom and SpaceX in regards to surplus cargo space, does Axiom or SpaceX own it?.

[Endeavour_01]

In today's ASAP meeting, they mentioned this is targeting January for an 8 day stay at ISS.

Damn, so we could have 6 manned crew dragon launches before Boeing sends a crewed mission up.

We won't know the final answer until OFT-2 data review is complete and CFT is in the final portion of its flow..

Indeed. That SpaceX is on track to launch 6 crewed missions in the space of 1.75 years after the first crewed launch is nothing short of amazing and awe inspiring. This pace surpasses the space shuttle and is almost equivalent to Apollo.

If OFT-2 launches on July 30th and everything goes well a Dec/Jan timeframe for CFT seems possible. If that does happen there may be some fluctuations in regards to the Ax-1 launch date vis a vis the VV schedule.

Even if CFT does get delayed beyond Jan there is a good possibility we could have 4 crewed missions to the ISS (Ax-1, CFT, Soyuz MS-21, Crew-4) in the first 3-4 months of 2022. Gonna be busy up there.

[Steven Pietrobon]

Indeed. That SpaceX is on track to launch 6 crewed missions in the space of 1.75 years after the first crewed launch is nothing short of amazing and awe inspiring.

Gemini did 10 crewed missions in 1.75 years from 1965 to 1966. The Space Shuttle flew nine missions in 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

[Lars-J]

Indeed. That SpaceX is on track to launch 6 crewed missions in the space of 1.75 years after the first crewed launch is nothing short of amazing and awe inspiring.

Gemini did 10 crewed missions in 1.75 years from 1965 to 1966. The Space Shuttle flew nine missions in 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

I think you missed the “after the first crewed launch” part. (For your space shuttle comparison)

[butters]

New policy conveniently goes into effect right after the AX-1 contract is signed.

It also conveniently went into effect right after NanoRacks deployed their nifty Bishop Airlock which relies on the ISS upmass/downmass and crew time pricing that was in place at the time. NASA screwed NanoRacks hard and good, and they are exhibiting a clear preference for Axiom's business model if not outright playing favorites. They don't want NanoRacks sending customer experiments to the ISS on Commercial Crew or CRS missions and have NASA astronauts do the work, they want payload customers to contract through Axiom, use their private visiting vehicle missions and their private crew time.

[gemmy0I]

New policy conveniently goes into effect right after the AX-1 contract is signed.

It also conveniently went into effect right after NanoRacks deployed their nifty Bishop Airlock which relies on the ISS upmass/downmass and crew time pricing that was in place at the time. NASA screwed NanoRacks hard and good, and they are exhibiting a clear preference for Axiom's business model if not outright playing favorites. They don't want NanoRacks sending customer experiments to the ISS on Commercial Crew or CRS missions and have NASA astronauts do the work, they want payload customers to contract through Axiom, use their private visiting vehicle missions and their private crew time.

Wasn't the new pricing the direct result of Congress refusing to give NASA the full funding it wanted under the LEO commercialization line item? My impression was that NASA wanted to maintain the original (subsidized) pricing, but were precluded from doing so by a lack of funding. In fact, I seem to remember Congress putting an explicit prohibition in their funding statute against subsidizing private ISS customers the way the original pricing did.

There was a fair amount of backlash in Congress when a certain perfume company took advantage of the ISS commercialization program to send some of its perfume samples to the ISS for a glorified photo shoot (using astronaut time paid for at what I believe were the subsidized rates). The timing couldn't have been worse as it went down right when NASA was trying to get Congress to fund that program. The optics of diverting valuable astronaut time to do perfume photo shoots at taxpayer-subsidized rates were not good. NASA's argument was that the goal was to stimulate as much commercial activity at the ISS as possible without placing significant restrictions on the purpose of that activity, the hope being that this would spur private investment that would allow the market to become self-sustaining when NASA removed the subsidies in the future. Congress didn't buy it, and therefore put the kibosh on the subsidized pricing. Hence private payloads can still fly to the ISS, but they have to pay the full price to adequately reimburse the resources and services they consume.

If that disfavors NanoRacks relative to Axiom, I suspect that is collateral damage more than outright favoritism. Keep in mind that NanoRacks had been working on the Bishop airlock for years, long before the subsidized pricing model came into effect which was a Bridenstine-era initiative. NanoRacks was no doubt quite happy to have the subsidized pricing (IIRC they were one of the major players involved in lobbying NASA to initiate the subsidies, arguing that they were needed to solve the "chicken or egg" problem for investment in private station payloads), but they had to have had a viable business plan in place for Bishop before that was on the table.

It didn't help that many in Congress were already broadly skeptical of NASA's LEO commercialization efforts. Congress has been very reluctant to fund anything that could lead to a commercial replacement for the ISS, because once the ISS has a commercial replacement the onus will be gone to keep funding the ISS's continuation past its designed lifetime. It's yet another classic pork battle. Although not nearly as egregious, many of the same political factors are in play with the ISS as with SLS. Precisely because the government-owned ISS is so expensive to maintain, it represents a lucrative stream of funding that supports a large number of jobs at Johnson Space Center (which overlap with a lot of other programs besides ISS), as well as to industry in the Houston area and elsewhere. It also doesn't hurt that the prime contractor for ISS maintenance and support is Boeing, a perennial favorite of Congress. Most of that expensive preventive maintenance that'll be needed to keep ISS going through 2030 gets funneled through Boeing. For instance, the iROSA arrays are being promoted as a Boeing contribution, even though Boeing actually subcontracted them out to another company (to Redwire, who originally developed the small-scale ROSA experiment) and is merely providing final integration (a service for which they no doubt upcharged richly).

That seems to be the main reason Congress has perennially underfunded NASA's budget requests on the LEO commercialization line item. If I understand things correctly, that line item covers both commercial replacement of the ISS and current programs for promoting commercial payloads on ISS, so the latter was likely a victim of the former's Congressional unpopularity.

[Endeavour_01]

Indeed. That SpaceX is on track to launch 6 crewed missions in the space of 1.75 years after the first crewed launch is nothing short of amazing and awe inspiring.

Gemini did 10 crewed missions in 1.75 years from 1965 to 1966. The Space Shuttle flew nine missions in 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

I think you missed the “after the first crewed launch” part. (For your space shuttle comparison)

Right Lars-J. I was also aware that Gemini had a faster pace (and that Mercury was slower) but I chose to make my sentence more succinct. My bad.

[yg1968]

Media Teleconference: 1st Private Astronaut Mission with Axiom Space: