Axiom Space — the one building the station
Houston, Texas headquartered. Co-founded 2016 by Michael Suffredini — former NASA ISS Program Manager — and Kam Ghaffarian. Building Axiom Station, the first commercial space station, whose modules attach to the ISS in phases and continue operations after ISS retirement in 2030 – 31. Has flown four private crewed missions to the ISS and holds the NASA contract for the Artemis III lunar surface spacesuit.
The Houston beginning
Axiom Space was founded in 2016 in Houston, Texas, by Michael Suffredini — who had led NASA's International Space Station Program from 2005 to 2015 — and Kam Ghaffarian, co-founder of Intuitive Machines and X-energy. Tejpaul Bhatia became chief executive in mid-2025.
The founding thesis is straightforward: the ISS was scheduled for retirement around 2030, and low-Earth-orbit human spaceflight would need a commercial platform to continue. In January 2020, NASA awarded Axiom the contract to attach commercial modules to the ISS — the first step toward what is now called Axiom Station.
The private missions
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Between April 2022 and July 2025, Axiom flew four private crewed missions to the International Space Station, all aboard SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules launched on Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center LC-39A. Each mission spent 17 to 21 days on-station running commercial and national-astronaut research programmes.
Ax-1 (April 2022) was the first all-commercial ISS mission, commanded by former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría with three private astronauts. Ax-2 (May 2023) was commanded by Peggy Whitson and included the first two Saudi astronauts to fly since 1985 — Ali AlQarni and Rayyanah Barnawi.
Ax-3 (January – February 2024) carried Italian, Turkish, and Swedish astronauts, including Alper Gezeravcı, the first Turkish citizen to reach orbit. Ax-4 (June – July 2025), commanded by Whitson again, carried Poland's Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski (ESA), Hungary's Tibor Kapu, and India's Shubhanshu Shukla — the first ISRO astronaut to visit the ISS.
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Axiom Station
Axiom Station is being built as an initially-attached extension of the ISS. Beginning around 2027, four Axiom-designed modules launch on Falcon Heavy and dock to the station's forward port on Node 2 (Harmony):
— AxH1, the primary habitation module, first to attach;
— AxH2, a second habitation module;
— ArMF, the airlock / research / manufacturing facility, providing external EVA capability and payload accommodations;
— PPTM, the payload / power / thermal module, providing solar arrays, thermal control, and communications independent of ISS.
Once PPTM is on-orbit and commissioned, the Axiom assembly detaches from the ISS to become a free-flying commercial space station — the plan for continuing commercial LEO human presence after ISS retirement in 2030 – 31.
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AxEMU — the lunar spacesuit
In September 2022, NASA awarded Axiom the Extravehicular Activity Services contract for the Artemis III lunar surface spacesuit — the first new NASA EVA suit design intended to reach the Moon since Apollo.
The AxEMU (Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit) accommodates a broader anthropometric range than earlier suits and is designed for extended surface operations at the lunar south pole. In October 2023, Axiom announced a partnership with Prada to design the outer garment layer. As of early 2026, AxEMU had accumulated more than 850 hours of testing at NASA Johnson Space Center, with the first flight unit targeted for Spring 2026.
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The commercial layer
Axiom is a private company; unlike Rocket Lab or Firefly, it does not disclose quarterly financials. Publicly-reported funding rounds have raised more than $500 million, and the company works under two structural NASA contracts — the ISS commercial-module attachment agreement (2020) and the Artemis EVA services contract (2022) — alongside per-mission commercial revenue from the four Ax flights and a growing bench of national-astronaut agreements with ESA, ISRO, the Turkish Space Agency, the Saudi Space Agency, and others.