Axiom Space is planning to start his fourth mission On Tuesday, June 10 – a mission that CEO Tejpaul Bhatia described as “a little bit of a round of victory”.
In addition to the fourth mission of the private space company to the International Space Station, Bhatia said the AX-4 will be Axiom Space’s second “fully national mission” where all customers are national governments. In fact, the company has also called this mission as the one that will “realize the return” to the human space flight to India, Poland and Hungary, which will each have an astronaut in the flight.
In addition, Bhatia said this would be the first “interruption” mission after the loss of money in the first three. He stressed that these ISS missions are “not our business model” -The company plans to add trade units to the ISS which are finally disconnected and becoming the free flight Values station.
At the same time, Bhatia said these initial missions bring revenue and help depict the demand for a commercial space flight. In addition, they create inspirational “Apollo moments” for each of the customer countries.
“It shows how the space opens due to commercial companies,” he said. “For all three countries, this will be their second astronaut. And shows the transition from Space Race 1.0 to Space Race 2.0.”
So far, Axiom Space missions have used SpaceX spacecraft to bring astronauts to the ISS. The role of the company, Bhatia said, is to serve as a “complex and market for the market” that can take these missions together. As the space industry is expanding, it predicted that there would be huge opportunities to continue to serve as a “managed market” for space, because “no one can only do that”.
“To make it complicated, this is not something a country has all the potential,” he added.
The prospects for commercial space trips seemed less confident in recent days, as the clutter between President Donald Trump and the CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk led Trump to declare that he was canceling government contracts with Musk and Musk companies. (Later seemed to retreat.)
Axiom’s space refused to comment on how Trump-musk dispute can affect the industry, but when I spoke Bhatia and I at the end of May, I asked him for a question about the political landscape-that is, if Possible budget cuts in NASA and widely Throughout scientific research He threatened the optimistic vision he presented.
“It’s not that government investments will open space,” Bhatia said. “They’ve already done it. [Now] They are the entrepreneurs who will use commercial platforms to build the bridge in the next stage. ”
The CEO is really relatively young in his current role. When we talked, Bhatia told me it was only his fourth week at work after Replacement of the co -founder of Dr. Kam ghaffarian as CEO. (Ghaffarian continues to serve as executive chairman of the company.)
But Bhatia – which was previously executive at Google Cloud – had already spent four years as head of the company’s revenue. While his career was not particularly focused on the space before joining Axiom Space, he said that since he was younger, “when I was dreaming, it has always been for space”.
And like any CEO of Good Space Company, Bhatia has hoped to finally travel to the final border.
“I would love to go,” he told me. “I have no doubt that we all go.”
