![]() ![]() She was contributing writer for for 10 years before joining full-time. Follow us on Twitter and on Facebook.Įlizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., is a staff writer in the spaceflight channel since 2022 covering diversity, education and gaming as well. The situation, she said, posed "opportunity cost in the form of overly stressing the workload of the onboard ISS members and the mission controllers who support them on the ground." Helms recommended additional training for future private astronaut missions to keep this issue from happening again.įollow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter. While Ax-1's arrival posed "no apparent overt safety issues" to Expedition 67, Helms said the private crew's extra needs caused some changes to the ISS flight crew timelines. "In essence, the arrival of the Axiom personnel seemed to have a larger-than-expected impact on the daily workload on the professional International Space Station crew," Helms, the chair of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during a May 12 meeting, as reported by SpaceNews. While Axiom will be making changes to its own procedures to account for the experience of Ax-1, NASA is adding other changes in its solicitation to ensure that research plans are communicated further ahead of time, "no later than 12 months prior to the launch date," as the solicitation states.įormer NASA astronaut Susan Helms previously pointed to impacts that Ax-1 had on the Expedition 67 crew's workload. Building a private space station: Q&A with Axiom Space CTO Matt Ondler Axiom Space developing in-house spacesuits to prepare for future stations NASA clears Axiom crew for 1st private mission to International Space Station "Secondly, NASA was a lot more comfortable having someone who had been there before." "It became pretty clear, first of all, that customers really didn't want to fly with nobody who has done it before," López-Alegría said. He also acknowledged that the discussion about former agency astronauts helming Axiom crews had already come up during planning discussions for Ax-1. "We didn't have time to do all that, so it was a challenge for us," López-Alegría added of his Ax-1 crew training. Old space shuttle crews with professional astronauts used to be trained and "choreographed" to an exact timeline, using a simulator that included hardware very similar to what was flown in space, he said. While the intense schedule was very similar to that of space shuttle missions, López-Alegría said there was a difference in how his crew was trained. For for the first six or seven days of the mission, he added, "there was no break people were staying up late, not getting enough sleep. "We didn't allow enough time for that," López-Alegría said. The Ax-1 crew had to get used to simple actions such as realizing that putting a pencil "down" would see it float away, he said. In comments posted on YouTube, López-Alegría told the ISS Research and Development Conference on July 28 that, despite months of training, his crew was "overwhelmed" by the adjustments that working in microgravity imposed. ![]() "We couldn't have done it without them," López-Alegría added, referring to Maurer and the other professional astronauts onboard the ISS at the time. In comments at a recent conference, López-Alegría called the European Space Agency's Matthias Maurer a "fourth crew member" for Ax-1. ![]()
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