In the coming weeks, Axiom Space's Ax-3 mission, which launches civilians into space, is scheduled to take off to the International Space Station. The company originally presented a crew of 4 astronauts who will be aboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, which will be launched by the Falcon 9 rocket – but in recent days the mission's commander, Michael Lopez-Alegría, revealed that there will be a "fifth friend" on board. We used Claude to explain where the other team member came from.
This friend's name is GiGi, and this is his second flight on a SpaceX spacecraft — he's already been there on its first flight, in 2022, along with Lopez-Alegria (which is his sixth flight into space — before private flights he was a NASA astronaut) — but he won't get the fame of the other crew members. This is because he is not a person, but a puppet of a bear.
Gigi is a doll by Build-A-Bear, which allows surfers to design their own custom teddy bear dolls. Before Axiom's first flight into space, they cooperatively brought out the teddy bear dressed in a futuristic space suit, and as mentioned, it was already on its first flight, and an identical bear has remained on the space station ever since. The bear's goal is to inspire children around the world and excite them around space.
However, Gigi serves another purpose: it is the team's 'sense of gravity'; Unlike humans on a spaceship, it is not strapped to a seat belt, and when they see it hovering around the spacecraft, they will know that they have reached weightlessness.
Gigi isn't the first toy to fly into space just to fly around the spacecraft and signal to astronauts that gravity no longer controls them: in the past, a soft model of Earth, a dinosaur made up of sequins, a Baby Yoda doll, and a number of animal dolls, including dogs, turtles, a monkey and a penguin, were used for this purpose. Last summer, she was sent, as a joke similar to the use of turtle dolls, a doll of a sloth, who was immediately crowned the fastest sloth in history.
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