During their almost two weeks in orbit, which include a schedule jam-packed with new research on the International Space Station (ISS), the astronauts of the Ax-1 crew are helping answer an important question: Can an all-private science mission successfully integrate into the ISS research flow and generate meaningful data?
“The answer is a resounding yes, and it’s a critical demonstration in our preparation for Axiom Station, the first commercial space station,” says Christian Maender, Axiom Space director of In-space Manufacturing and Research. “We learned a great deal leading up to the Ax-1 mission – about how to integrate our customers’ research missions with NASA as a commercial company and how to train private astronauts to carry out the research on the ISS. In-orbit, the Ax-1 crew is validating all that preparation with great success.”
With assistance from ground teams, including at Axiom Space Mission Control in Houston, science teams and principal investigators for the research were directly engaged and followed along with the Ax-1 astronauts as they completed the investigations. This “over-the-shoulder” support allowed them to guide the crew with the Axiom Space ground team as a liaison. On future missions, including those to Axiom Station, the goal is to reduce the intermediary role.
“Our plan for the future is principal investigators will collaborate remotely from their own institutions if they don’t wish to be on-site at Axiom Space, providing even more options for direct engagement between the science teams on the ground and the crew in space,” Maender says. “NASA and the International Space Station Program have already demonstrated direct interaction between scientists on the ground and crews in-orbit on the ISS. We hope to make that model an operational routine on Axiom Station.”
A great example of complex preparation translating into operational success was the Modeling Tumor Organoids project. Axiom worked with several commercial partners and in-house staff to certify new flight hardware used to launch, host, and image live stem cells to study pre-cancer and cancerous changes induced by spaceflight. High-quality images of cells fluorescing under special lighting conditions were captured with a new microscope on the ISS being operated remotely from the ground. Guidance on what to image was provided by project scientists sitting next to the operators and from a remote location at University of California San Diego.
Similar experiments require the return of live cells from the ISS at the end of the Ax-1 mission along with a significant amount of additional frozen samples that have been in cold storage on the ISS since before the Ax-1 mission. Ax-1 is augmenting the existing cargo return capabilities of the ISS Program. Once the crew splashes down off the coast of Florida in the Dragon spacecraft, the Axiom Space ground team will move quickly to receive the astronauts and the science, so they can get it into the hands of researchers to continue their important work.
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