Axiom in trouble?
The assembly sequence for Axiom’s space station while attached to ISS.
Click for original image.
A long article yesterday in Forbes described serious financial issues with the space station startup Axiom, problems so severe the company is laying off workers and has trouble meeting its payroll.
The problems have been accentuated by hiring too many people and the delays in building its modules for attachment to ISS.
The lack of fresh capital has exacerbated long-standing financial challenges that have grown alongside Axiom’s payroll, which earlier this year was nearly 1,000 employees. Sources familiar with the company’s operations told Forbes that cofounder and CEO Michael Suffredini, who spent 30 years at NASA, ran Axiom like a big government program instead of the resource-constrained startup it really was. His mandate to staff up to 800 workers by the end of 2022 led to mass hiring so detached from product development needs that new engineers often found themselves with nothing to do, these people said.
When Axiom was founded in 2016, it promised investors the first station module would be aloft in 2020.
That first module is presently not expected to launch until 2026, six years late. Its main structure is being built by Thales-Alenia in Europe, and work there has been much slower than expected, possibly because Axiom has been slow in providing the expected capital.
The article also describes in detail the financial loss Axiom has experienced in its manned private flights to ISS, where it hires SpaceX to provide the rocket and capsule. The costs have been higher than expected, made worse by requirements and charges imposed on it by NASA. As a result the company lost money on the first three flights, and expects the fourth this year to only break-even.
Whether Axiom will survive, based on this article, is very questionable. We will just have to wait and see however. All other indications suggest it is in a stronger position than at least one other commercial station, Blue Origin-led Orbital Reef, and matches well with Voyager Space’s Starlab. These of the three stations being built with NASA’s financial help.
The one station that might beat them all however remains the entirely private Vast Haven-1 station. It has taken no government money and yet expects to launch its first small module before any of the former stations, in the second half of 2026. and immediatley fly astronauts to it for a 30-day mission.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
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
The assembly sequence for Axiom’s space station while attached to ISS.
Click for original image.
A long article yesterday in Forbes described serious financial issues with the space station startup Axiom, problems so severe the company is laying off workers and has trouble meeting its payroll.
The problems have been accentuated by hiring too many people and the delays in building its modules for attachment to ISS.
The lack of fresh capital has exacerbated long-standing financial challenges that have grown alongside Axiom’s payroll, which earlier this year was nearly 1,000 employees. Sources familiar with the company’s operations told Forbes that cofounder and CEO Michael Suffredini, who spent 30 years at NASA, ran Axiom like a big government program instead of the resource-constrained startup it really was. His mandate to staff up to 800 workers by the end of 2022 led to mass hiring so detached from product development needs that new engineers often found themselves with nothing to do, these people said.
When Axiom was founded in 2016, it promised investors the first station module would be aloft in 2020.
That first module is presently not expected to launch until 2026, six years late. Its main structure is being built by Thales-Alenia in Europe, and work there has been much slower than expected, possibly because Axiom has been slow in providing the expected capital.
The article also describes in detail the financial loss Axiom has experienced in its manned private flights to ISS, where it hires SpaceX to provide the rocket and capsule. The costs have been higher than expected, made worse by requirements and charges imposed on it by NASA. As a result the company lost money on the first three flights, and expects the fourth this year to only break-even.
Whether Axiom will survive, based on this article, is very questionable. We will just have to wait and see however. All other indications suggest it is in a stronger position than at least one other commercial station, Blue Origin-led Orbital Reef, and matches well with Voyager Space’s Starlab. These of the three stations being built with NASA’s financial help.
The one station that might beat them all however remains the entirely private Vast Haven-1 station. It has taken no government money and yet expects to launch its first small module before any of the former stations, in the second half of 2026. and immediatley fly astronauts to it for a 30-day mission.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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
Outside of a rare few…space privatization amounts to a handful of billionaires with disposable income.
Anything besides that likely fails–sorry to burst your bubble
Hello Jeffrey,
And yet, almost all of the customers for Axiom missions after the first one have been sovereign customers — national governments. State space agencies of countries big enough to have space ambitions but not big enough to have their own human spaceflight capabilities. On Axiom 4, the passengers will be professional astronauts working for the space agencies of India, Hungary, and Poland.
Not sure if there are enough of them to support all these commercial stations, but whatever their numbers, they are more likely to be the majority of the market than billionaire tourists.
It would be nice if someone just launched something.
Jeff Wright wrote: “Outside of a rare few…space privatization amounts to a handful of billionaires with disposable income.”
The launch companies may look like a handful of billionaires, but Sierra Space is not run by billionaires but by a family that bought Sierra Nevada at an affordable price. Peter Beck of Rocket Lab was not a billionaire and had to find investors. There are a hundred or so companies that say they want to launch small satellites, but only about 20 of them have worked toward that goal, and very few of them were founded by billionaires, and like Rocket Lab, they raised funds through investors..
There are plenty of new satellite operators who are not billionaires. The image is that commercial space is a billionaire’s toy, but the reality is different. Real people without real money are finding investors who believe in them and are able to work toward a goal of a booming commercial space industry.
Even Axoim was not founded by billionaires. It was founded in 2016 by Michael Suffredini and Kam Ghaffarian, whose fortune came only last year, when his Intuitive Machines space company merged with a SPAC (Special-Purpose Acquisition Company).
Come to think of it, Musk wasn’t a billionaire when he founded SpaceX. Thus, we may be able to say that doing business in space could make billionaires, not take billionaires.
In fact, the billionaires are the rare few. They are merely more celebrated by the propaganda organizations — er — news organizations.