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The great commercial takeover of low Earth orbit

Axiom Space and other companies are betting they can build private structures to replace the International Space Station.

This will involve a “deorbit vehicle” docking with the ISS, which is the size of a football field (including end zones), and firing thrusters so that the station, which circles the Earth at five miles per second, slams down squarely in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, avoiding land, injury, and the loss of human life. Suspended from the wall above, large, low-fidelity models of spacecraft hung from the ceiling, including the X-38 (an experimental emergency return vehicle for space station crew) and Zvezda, the Russian module of the ISS, which today is plagued by age-induced stress fractures and consequent leaks. Wagner, Birge, and their team at LambdaVision had an idea for something that might help: a simple, flexible implant, about as big as the circle stamped out by a hole punch and the thickness of a piece of construction paper, that could replace the damaged light-­sensing cells and restore full vision.

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