Biography | Kam Ghaffarian — Launch Complex 39A on the Morning Axiom Flew the First Private Crew to Station

At 11:17 a.m. Eastern on 8 April 2022, a Falcon 9 left Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center with Crew Dragon Endeavour and four people aboard.

The flight was Axiom Mission 1, the first all-private crewed mission to the International Space Station.

NASA, SpaceX, and Axiom Space all logged that time and pad.

Ghaffarian had co-founded Axiom in 2016 with Michael Suffredini, a former ISS program manager.

He serves as executive chairman.

The crew was commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut flying for Axiom, with Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe, and Mark Pathy as the paying flyers.

Endeavour docked with the station's Harmony module the next day, 9 April at 12:29 UTC.

Splashdown was 25 April at 17:06 UTC off Florida after 17 days.

The pad is the same 39A that launched Apollo Saturn V vehicles and later shuttle missions.

SpaceX leases it from NASA.

Ax-1 did not make Ghaffarian an astronaut.

It made the company he had started six years earlier the operator of a commercial crew rotation to a government station.

Axiom's mission control sat in Houston.

The public moment, the one a visitor can still stand under, is this concrete at Kennedy.

Later Axiom flights reused the same commercial-crew pattern.

The first one is the one that changed the category.

Photo: NASA, public domain, NHQ202204080006, Falcon 9 on Launch Complex 39A for Ax-1.