Yeah, Axiom is working on a private space station that would bud off the ISS when it deorbits. Although they have some money problems right now.
For asteroid mining, look up AstroForge. They're working on mining platinum group metals from near Earth m-type asteroids. They launched a forge demo sat and soon will launch an asteroid RPO demo sat.
We're in a new space race.
There are too many rocket companies to list. This commercialization drives down launch costs and increases capacity, which benefits private companies and public research institutions.
There was just a record number of people in orbit (19) that'll get broken again in the coming years. The ISS will get new modules. Tiangong has been expanding. The Lunar Gateway station is under construction. Several private space stations are under construction. And multiple companies and countries are working on new crewed vehicles.
Starlink has customers in 99 countries as of March. It's a global service.
Directed at European launch companies:
You couldn't live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me.
I still get surprised by how many companies managed to get funding for smallsat launch.
And not even close to the same size class. The "good news" is that Hyundai sells a totally different vehicle in the US?
Casper: 141.54" l, 62.80" w, 62.01" h
Ioniq 5: 182.48" l, 74.41" w, 63.19" h
Wow. That's a lot of money for IM. And NASA. I'm really curious to hear more details about this. It's a great idea and is definitely needed to expand lunar operations, but I was not expecting that number.
Axiom's timeline for their station is really dicey because of their dependency on the ISS until they're ready to dive into the deep end on their own. They can't just be 10 years late. I hope they make it. I think it's interesting that they're switching from Thales Alenia to Gravitics for modules. It must be a huge cost saver, but it might be too little, too late. They started off as ISS USOS v1.5, which adds some challenges vs the single module stations that are trying to be Skylab v2.
The hope was that they could be cheaper, faster, and more efficient than if NASA developed the suits and station themselves. Axiom underbid, either on purpose to win the contract, or accidentally. This is where the firm fixed price model might be breaking down for NASA.
This and BLEO (beyond low earth orbit) are "the acronym knows where it is because it knows where it isn't"
Yup, and they have to be specifically tailored, and, even then, keeping them tight-fitting at joints is a challenge. There are some concepts with pressurized traditional gloves to work around some of that.
Why did they need to reinvent and overcomplicate a door handle in the first place?