It may have seemed that there were few daring pastimes left for John Shoffner to pursue after a high-speed career spent as a sports car driver, airshow pilot and skydiver. That was until the opportunity came along to fly in a spacecraft around the planet at 17,500mph.
His wife had spotted a newspaper article about a new company, Axiom Space, that was brokering the first all-private missions to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Crew Dragon capsule chartered from SpaceX. The price tag for the eight-day round trip: around $55 million (£39 million).
“My wife knows my love of space. She showed the article to me and said, ‘You need to call these people.’ It took me about 12 seconds to boot up the
