Axiom’s commercial viability may be on the downturn

In a detail-packed Forbes report, sources say that Axiom Space is struggling to make payroll, is late on payments to its contractors (including SpaceX), and has begun downsizing some aspects of the company. All this while outside capital has become increasingly difficult to find.

Last month, Axiom Space’s longtime CEO and co-founder, Mike Suffredini, stepped down suddenly, stating unspecified personal reasons, and would transition to being an advisor and board member.

A new Forbes report paints a picture that Suffredini built a mini-NASA-like company, overgrown with unneeded costs that it is now struggling to make its payments and payroll. Even worse, the entire commercial viability of the company could be over due to delays and now required downsizing of its space station plans.

“Axiom found itself struggling to make payroll, which hit $10 million a month in early 2023 per an internal document, and it fell behind on payments to suppliers,” the report states. Axiom’s primary goal was to build a commercial LEO space station cheaper and faster by piggybacking off NASA’s ISS. Consisting of several modules for crew quarters, power, research, and manufacturing spaces, after being fully assembled it would detach and become a free-flying station.

This would take time and a lot of knowledge to learn to successfully operate a space station. In the meantime, Axiom took on launching private astronaut missions to the ISS for billionaires and foreign nations that can afford it.

Next, the company saw an opportunity to expand its capabilities and get NASA funding for a project it would need eventually, an EVA suit. NASA gave Axiom hundreds of millions of dollars to start the development of the suit it would use for Artemis lunar EVAs. Axiom was selected alongside Collins Aerospace, a legacy firm with ties to developing the Apollo EVA suits and the current suits used on the ISS. Collins has since dropped out of the contract, leaving Axiom as the only company in the competition.

All of these programs will cost billions of dollars to develop, and NASA has only given a fraction of the money for the services it requires from the company. So far, all three private astronaut missions have been operated at a loss. “‘Turns out that there’s not a lot of billionaires that want to set aside their life for 18 months to go train to be an astronaut for the ISS,’ a former Axiom executive told Forbes.”

On top of that, NASA made a decision to require a former NASA astronaut to command each private mission. Great for former astronauts looking for work but not great for Axiom as it cuts each mission’s revenue by ~25%. The company expects the next mission in early 2025 to be near breakeven.

Company employees told Forbes that the space suit program of the company is in a much steadier place, with funding by NASA and a real possibility it will get selected as the sole provider, unless SpaceX swoops in at the last minute.

Axiom came out with about $500 million in a recent fundraising round. “With every round, as soon as it came in, you pay SpaceX, you pay Thales Alenia, you pay your bills and then it’s gone,” a former executive told Forbes.

Due to the tightening of the purse strings under interim CEO and co-founder Kam Ghaffarian, Axiom has instituted layoffs, a voluntary 20% pay cut to employees, and had talks about scaling back its space station.

With continued delays to Axiom Station’s first launch, which is getting closer and closer to the ISS’s planned 2030 end date, any scaling back jeopardizes Axiom’s mission as a whole. With the company already struggling to find more funding, if the whole point of the company is to build an LEO station, and even that doesn’t look to be going well, what else can the company do?

A last hope for Axiom will be a contract with NASA to be a provider for its LEO destination contract and replace the ISS. However, it has some steep competition with Vast, Blue Origin and Sierra Space, and even SpaceX with Starship.

Wherever the future lies for Axiom, it will be a difficult road ahead to make its business model a commercial success.