Amy Nordrum

And in the end, that might help bring down the cost of an electric car and make it more affordable for more people.

Well, we've already started to see it change in the last couple of years.

We've seen companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic offer suborbital flights of a few minutes to provide people with the experience of weightlessness and just private citizens, not professionally trained astronauts.

Even NASA has started allowing...

private astronauts to travel up to the ISS with a company called Axiom.

And that's been happening for the last couple of years.

But really what's changing now is that there's this whole rash of new private space stations that are due to be launched over the next couple of years, and which will eventually replace the International Space Station, which has been operating for decades.

And those private space stations will not just support government missions, but

in many cases, also private astronauts from companies that want to do research in space or people who just want to get a view outside, you know, a space station window of the Earth that we all live on.

Yeah, I got to say they're going to look pretty fancy based on some of the mock-ups that I've seen.

Some of the companies active here have been seemingly trying to provide a pretty like luxury space experience for lack of a better word.

So Axiom is one that has contracted with a famous French architect and designer to design the inside.

It has spacesuits designed by Prada.

There's different amenities in some of these space stations.

And they're not nearly as big as the International Space Station, certainly not in these first iterations.

They're a fraction of the size, really.

Over time, they hope and intend to scale up to that.

But in the next couple of years, we'll be seeing much smaller models later.

That's a really fair question.

I mean, we could see, you know, for example, if this opens up access to more private companies doing research, maybe there will be pharmaceuticals that are developed based on that research or new kinds of electronics and semiconductors that companies, you know, might not have otherwise had time on the International Space Station.