SpaceX is heading back to the launch pad, this time to put a group of four private citizens into orbit for a first-of-its-kind trip to the International Space Station.
The trip was put together by Axiom Space, a private startup that’s booking rides with SpaceX and coordinating flights to the ISS for anyone who can afford it.
The passengers on this trip — which includes former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegría, who will command the mission as an Axiom employee, and three paying customers — are slated to take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday at 12:05 pm ET. They’ll ride inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, the same capsule that SpaceX has used to carry NASA astronauts to the ISS already. The capsule rides to orbit on top of one of SpaceX’s 230-foot-tall Falcon 9 rockets.
The capsule will then separate from the rocket and freefly through space all day Thursday as the spacecraft slowly maneuvers closer to the ISS. It’s slated to dock at the space station around 3 am ET Friday.
This mission, called AX-1, will mark the first time in history that private citizens, or otherwise non-professional astronauts, will launch to the ISS from US soil. And it’s the first of what Axiom, the company that organized and brokered this mission with SpaceX, hopes will be many similar flights for anyone who can afford it.
The AX-1 mission is also only the second space tourism flight for SpaceX, following up the September 2021 launch of four private citizens on a three-day, freeflying trip through orbit that travelled even higher than the ISS.
During their eight-day stay on the space station, the AX-1 crew will conduct some science experiments, break bread with the professional astronauts already on board the football-field sized space station, and enjoy sweeping views of our home planet whisking by down below.
WHO’S ON THIS MISSION?
Lopez-Alegría, 63, took of four trips to space between 1995 and 2007 during his time with NASA. He left the space agency in 2012, and he joined Axiom a few years later with the aim of going back to space — but as a private astronaut rather than an official member of the corps.
Axiom serves as an intermediary between paying customers who want to take a multimillion-dollar thrill ride to space, booking flights with SpaceX, handling negotiations with NASA, and taking over the training for the would-be space travellers. Axiom hopes to make these flights a regular occurrence, as NASA agreed a few years ago to open up the ISS to space tourism and other commercial ventures.
It’s not clear how much these trips cost the customer. Though previously disclosed prices indicated a trip to the ISS is US$55 million per seat, Axiom declined to confirm that figure this week. (“Axiom Space does not disclose financial terms,” Axiom spokesperson Bettina Inclan told CNN Buisness via email.)
There are three paying customers on this flight. They are all wealthy white men, continuing a trend plaguing the commercial spaceflight sector and its inaccessibility to more diverse swaths of the population. The vast majority of people who have thus far been able to afford to pay their way to space — whether on SpaceX flights or suborbital missions like those offered by Blue Origin — have been white businessmen. It’s indicative of just how far the reality is from the promised far-off space dream that comes from entrepreneurs who claim that space is “for everyone” and commercializing space will “democratize it” amid ballooning income inequality. With price points this exuberant, space will remain commercially accessible only to the elite few for the foreseeable future. Though the aim is to eventually drastically reduce the cost of getting to space, hopefully making ticket prices affordable for more people, it’s not clear how or when that will happen.
REAL ESTATE TYCOON LARRY CONNOR
Larry Connor, 72, is a real estate tycoon from Dayton, Ohio. He founded The Connor Group, which has developments in 16 markets across the country and has more than $3.5 billion in assets, according to the company’s website. He’s an avid adventurer, having raced cars and climbed mountains.
He also has experience as a private pilot and has participated in aerobatic competitions, and he’ll be the designated pilot for this mission. (It should be noted SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is fully autonomous, though spaceflight pilots train to be prepared to take over is something goes awry.)
“My journey really started seven or eight years ago. I’ve always been interested in space, and I started thinking about after I read about an American who went to Russia and went on the Soyuz [spacecraft],” he said in an interview with the Dayton Society of Natural History last year, after his plans to fly on AX-1 were revealed.
Connor was likely referring to one of the US citizens who booked a flight to the ISS through Space Adventures, a company that has booked seats aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft for tourists going back to the early 2000s. Those flight have always been coordinated with the Russian space agency and included official Russian astronauts. The AX-1 mission will be the first to include a crew made up entirely of private astronauts.
Connor said he decided to book the mission for “the challenge.”
“We are going to truly train to the professional astronaut standards,” he said.
FORMER SHIPPING CEO MARK PATHY
Mark Pathy, 52, is the founder and CEO of the Canadian investment firm and family office Mavrik Corp. It’s website states that Mavrik has a “particular focus on innovation, entrepreneurship, and responsible investing,” though not many of its investing decisions are public.
CB Insights, which tracks private investments, lists only one known investment. It backed a Canadian startup called Ferme d’hiver, which says it “offers AI-powered agricultural automation tools.”
Of the AX-1 mission, Pathy told CTV News: “It is a lot of money. I feel very fortunate to be able to afford this kind of trip. Obviously not many people can. But at the same time I don’t have to, fortunately, choose between doing something like this or being active philanthropically.”
He added that it’s “been a dream since I was a little kid and watched Captain Kirk bouncing around the universe in the Enterprise” to go to space.
EYTAN STIBBE
Eytan Stibbe, 64, is an Israeli businessman.
According to his Axiom bio, Stibbe, a former fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force, founded Vital Capital a decade ago. Its website states the company invests in companies involved in sectors like food and healthcare across developing areas, notably across Africa, for “high-return opportunities.”
Axiom says that Stibbe’s journey is happening “in collaboration” with the Ramon Foundation, a space education non-profit named for Israel’s first astronaut, Ilan Ramon, who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. Stibbe’s Axiom bio also says he and Ramon shared a “close” friendship. Stibbe will be only the second Israeli to go to space.
He announced his decision to join the AX-1 crew at a ceremony at the Israeli President’s Residence in 2020, and it was met with criticism from Israeli press, which pointed to alleged dealings in Stibbe’s past, particularly related to accusations of trafficking military equipment during his time with LR Group, an investment and development group and which he left in 2011, according to a representative for Stibbe.
Specifically, reports allege that Stibbe was involved in the sale of military aircraft in Angola, which was embroiled in a brutal civil war from the 1970s through 2002.
In a television interview from 2012, which was conducted in Hebrew and translated by Israeli news outlets and CNN Business, Stibbe also appeared to confirm his involvement.
“We helped Angola end the war by bringing them interceptor aircraft, two Su-27 fighter planes, from Uzbekistan,” he said. “Their presence in the country stopped the flights that were supplying weapons, food and ammunition and the export of illegal diamonds from Angola. After one, or one and a half years, the war ended.”
A statement shared with CNN Business on behalf of Stibbe states that, “LR Group’s business in Angola dealt almost exclusively with agricultural infrastructure, vocational training, water, airports, and telecommunications.”
It adds that LR Group “received a request from the [US-backed Angolan] government to help upgrade its airspace infrastructure to ICAO international standards,” and that the aircraft sales were made “with export licenses and were completely legal.”
“In addition, the aircraft and air-control radars were used for deterrence purposes only,” the statement reads.
LR Group responded in a statement to CNN Business, saying “LR Group has been involved in the fields of health, telecommunications, food, agriculture, renewable energy and water, with the aim of developing the independence and economic and social well-being of local populations around the world.”
“During the time when Stibbe was a partner in the company, he was serving as the partner responsible for the operation and financing of the company’s business activity in Angola,” the statement reads. “After he separated from the company, he bought in 2012 the activity in Angola, and continued operating there.”
LR Group is currently involved in a legal dispute pertaining to allegations against Stibbe dating to when he was a partner at the company.
Stibbe’s representatives declined to comment on the legal battle.
As for his decision to go to space, Stibbe said “as a kid on dark nights I used to watch the stars and wait patiently to see a shooting star, and I asked myself, What is there beyond what the eyes see?” he said in comments translated by i24NEWS.
With his launch slated for this week, Stibbe will soon find out.
More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
