Axiom charges $70 million per ticket to fly to ISS
Axiom’s assembly sequence for its planned station, initially attached to ISS but subsequently detached
According to this article today about Axiom’s tourist flights to ISS, the company now charges $70 million per ticket, which means that for the AX-4 flight scheduled for launch tomorrow, the revenues from India, Poland, and Hungary total about $210 million.
That money of course doesn’t all end up in Axiom’s pockets. It has to pay SpaceX for the launch and use of the Dragon capsule. It also has to pay NASA some recently imposed high fees to use its astronaut training facilities as well as lease time on ISS.
All told, I suspect Axiom’s profits for these flights is relatively small. The company however has other reasons to fly these missions. It is attempting to win NASA’s big space station construction contract, and these flights to ISS demonstrate the company’s ability to manage such operations while working with NASA. Of the other three space station projects competing for that contract, only Vast is planning to do the same.
This effort by these two companies is part of the reason I rank them first and second for winning that contract.
- Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, with Haven-1 to launch and be occupied in 2026 for an estimated 30 days total. It hopes this actual hardware and manned mission will put it in the lead to win NASA’s phase 2 contract, from which it will build its much larger mult-module Haven-2 station..
- Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched three tourist flights to ISS, with a fourth scheduled for tomorrow, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
- Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Overall, Blue Origin has built almost nothing, while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building its module for launch.
- Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreement with the European Space Agency. It recently had its station design approved by NASA, but it has built nothing. This might change once it obtains several hundred million dollars from its initial public offering of stock.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Axiom’s assembly sequence for its planned station, initially attached to ISS but subsequently detached
According to this article today about Axiom’s tourist flights to ISS, the company now charges $70 million per ticket, which means that for the AX-4 flight scheduled for launch tomorrow, the revenues from India, Poland, and Hungary total about $210 million.
That money of course doesn’t all end up in Axiom’s pockets. It has to pay SpaceX for the launch and use of the Dragon capsule. It also has to pay NASA some recently imposed high fees to use its astronaut training facilities as well as lease time on ISS.
All told, I suspect Axiom’s profits for these flights is relatively small. The company however has other reasons to fly these missions. It is attempting to win NASA’s big space station construction contract, and these flights to ISS demonstrate the company’s ability to manage such operations while working with NASA. Of the other three space station projects competing for that contract, only Vast is planning to do the same.
This effort by these two companies is part of the reason I rank them first and second for winning that contract.
- Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, with Haven-1 to launch and be occupied in 2026 for an estimated 30 days total. It hopes this actual hardware and manned mission will put it in the lead to win NASA’s phase 2 contract, from which it will build its much larger mult-module Haven-2 station..
- Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched three tourist flights to ISS, with a fourth scheduled for tomorrow, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
- Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Overall, Blue Origin has built almost nothing, while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building its module for launch.
- Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreement with the European Space Agency. It recently had its station design approved by NASA, but it has built nothing. This might change once it obtains several hundred million dollars from its initial public offering of stock.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Interesting, but not surprising. The literally sky-high “rack rate” NASA charges for non-NASA ISS visitors will, of course, cease to be an issue once ISS is decommissioned. The new commercial space stations will be designed to allow making a profit on far less lofty daily charges.
As a crew vehicle, Dragon carries too few occupants over which to spread the cost of launch and vehicle refurb to ever make it possible to cut ticket prices much below the current $70 million.
Starship, by the time it is able to carry people, will have relatively trivial refurb costs. So, even if a Starship launch is priced the same as a current F9 launch, carrying 20 or so passengers to, say, Haven-2, with its 32-person max capacity would allow an entire zero to be knocked off the current Axiom ticket price.
That won’t instantly turn destination-based orbital tourism into a mass market, but it will certainly expand the addressable market. It will take the advent of still larger space stations and Starships with airliner-class seating capacities to get an additional zero knocked off of ticket prices. Something for the 2040s or 2050s I think.
Dick Eagleson wrote: “As a crew vehicle, Dragon carries too few occupants over which to spread the cost of launch and vehicle refurb to ever make it possible to cut ticket prices much below the current $70 million.”
Unless SpaceX figures out a way to fly six or seven astronauts safely. Then the price tag could fall to closer to $50 million per seat. Considering that NASA had a backup plan for two astronauts to do an emergency reentry on makeshift seats on a Dragon, it seems to me that the Dragon design cannot be far from being able to fly at least six and maybe seven astronauts. Last year, NASA thought Dragon could do a safe six-person reentry.
“… So, even if a Starship launch is priced the same as a current F9 launch, carrying 20 or so passengers to, say, Haven-2, with its 32-person max capacity would allow an entire zero to be knocked off the current Axiom ticket price.”
Haven-2 is expected to be a fairly large space station, so the added mass and mass-moment-of-inertia of a Starship may not be as difficult to control as on a smaller space station (e.g. single module). Using Starship for Haven-2 crews and resupply (same ship) may be a reasonable option. We will have to see whether Vast designs its modules and control systems to accommodate such a large transportation ship.
Other launch companies may find better efficiencies in future superheavy launch vehicles (>50,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit), so while we might consider Starship to be the cure-all for launches, I think we can expect competition in the next decade or two.
One thing future larger space stations need to address is the “escape pod” problem. Ideally, every hab module on future space stations should have escape pod capacity equal to the maximum occupancy for the module. Such escape pods should probably be integral to the modules to avoid the expense of launching them separately. The current kluge “solution” used on ISS, Tiangong and all previous Russian space stations of keeping the vehicles that deliver crew around for the crew’s entire tour of duty to act as a contingency escape pod is not economically sustainable.
In future, the transit vehicle that takes people to a space station must be able to stick around only long enough to drop off new arrivals and take aboard any visitors whose “shifts” are over. A single Starship of decent passenger capacity could act in this way as a sort of orbital city bus, dropping off fresh crew/tourists and taking on those due to depart at one or more commercial space stations per trip. If most or all commercial LEO destinations are at the same orbital inclination this job would be easiest, but even some modest plane changes on the route would not be unworkable. Such a system would allow both short-term and longer-term stays on any given station while keeping the Starship “bus” in active revenue service many times per year. If SpaceX manages to achieve the sort of quick turnaround for Starship that it wants to, such a Starship “bus” could earn additional revenue and stay busy by doing quick orbital tourist jaunts in between runs made to space stations.