Meet the People Paying $55 Million Each to Fly to the Space Station
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Meet the people paying $55 million each to fly to the space station:
Two are grandfathers, the other has three young children. All three are extremely wealthy, with the means to pay the $55 million ticket price for an eight-day stay on the International Space Station. They are the first would-be spaceflight crew comprised entirely of private citizens in a mission to the station.
Sometime early next year, if all goes according to plan, the trio - Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik Corp., a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli Air Force fighter pilot - will lift off from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft for what is scheduled to be an eight-day stay on the International Space Station.
Accompanying them will be Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who flew to space four times and is now a vice president of Axiom Space, the Houston-based company that is coordinating their trip to space. Lopez-Alegria is overseeing their training and will serve as the mission's commander.
[...] Pathy and Connor traveled to Cape Canaveral last year to witness SpaceX's first launch of astronauts. It was the first time either of them had been to a rocket launch, and both said they were awestruck.
You feel that sound in your chest," Pathy said. And for me, especially, I'm thinking that was going to be me in a few months. It was a really exciting and intense experience."
Axiom Space at Wikipedia.
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