Axiom Space

Axiom has flown four private astronaut missions to the space station, carrying government crews from India, Poland, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE. It also holds NASA's contract for the spacesuit Artemis astronauts will wear on the Moon, having become the sole active provider when Collins Aerospace withdrew, and since January 2026 it has operated two data centre nodes aboard the station.

The plan the company was built on is to attach modules to the ISS and then detach them when the station retires, inheriting its role rather than competing to replace it. On that logic the astronaut missions are both revenue and rehearsal, and the modules arrive with customers already attached.

None of the station has flown, and the plan has been reordered repeatedly. In late 2024 Axiom swapped its first module from the habitat to a simpler power and thermal unit, which has since moved from 2026 to 2027 and in some accounts to 2028. The company went through three chief executives in roughly a year, cut about a hundred jobs, asked staff to take a voluntary twenty per cent pay cut, was reported to be behind on payments to suppliers, and raised a down round at $2 billion in March 2025 before recovering to around $2.5 billion a year later. The ground has shifted under the premise as well: NASA paused its commercial station programme in January 2026, spent the spring weighing whether to build a government-owned core module instead, and had still not issued a final solicitation by that August. The astronaut business, meanwhile, is a brokerage, buying Dragon flights and station time to resell, and the last Dragon capsule has now been built.