Axiom Space recently launched its fourth private crew to the International Space Station.

AX4 lifted off from Florida in a SpaceX Dragon capsule on June 25th and is currently completing a two-week tour on the ISS.

The mission was sponsored by three countries, India, Poland, and Turkey, which each sent an astronaut, along with Axiom's

Peggy Woodson, a former NASA astronaut herself, as commander.

CEO Tej Palbatia says the business model is about creating access.

Think of it as a space program, a space agency in a box, a space operating system for countries, corporations, and civilizations.

How do we do everything that we've learned over the last 60 years and condense it into a six-month-to-a-year-long

process for a country that has never had an astronaut on the ISS or in some

of our cases ever in space like Turkey.

And you mentioned India, which has a very accelerated, aggressive and ambitious space program.

Batya, a serial entrepreneur and space investor, became CEO just over two months ago, and the timing is critical.

In addition to quote precursor missions, the eight-year-old startup is developing its own commercial space station

and designing lunar spacesuits with Prada for NASA.

There is a lot of venture capital out there for businesses like this, but the long-term play here and the scale that we're going for,

we're not going for a unicorn or dec-acorn type of outcome.

We're looking to be the next Google, Microsoft, Amazon, MEDA, Nvidia.

These companies that 30 years ago didn't exist were high-tech venture-backed companies, and then now these are names that we can't even imagine the world without.

And that is the destiny that Axiom has chosen.

On this episode, Axioms Tej Batya on the AX4 mission, how the space economy is evolving, and on whether Axiom Space has any plans to go public.

I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space.

Axiom Space is an eight-year-old startup.

We were created to build the successor to the International Space Station.

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