Biography|Michael Suffredini — The Ellington Groundbreaking for a Commercial Station

On 11 May 2022 Axiom Space and the City of Houston broke ground at Ellington Airport, the licensed Houston Spaceport.

Michael Suffredini stood there as president, chief executive, and co-founder.

He and Kam Ghaffarian had started the company in 2016, months after Suffredini left NASA.

The SAM record lists a start date of 1 October 2016.

Alumni profiles put the founding in January of that year.

Either way the firm was six years old when the shovels went into this field.

The first phase was a 106,000-square-foot assembly, integration, and test hall, designed with Jacobs and built by Turner, aimed at April 2023.

Later phases added labs, mission operations, training, and offices.

The street the campus now uses is Enterprise Shuttle Street.

Texas licensing files give 2539 Enterprise Shuttle Street, Houston, as the headquarters fit-out address.

A month before the groundbreaking, on 8 April 2022, Axiom Mission 1 had lifted from Kennedy's Launch Complex 39A — the first all-private crew to the ISS.

That pad already has its own pin in another life on this map.

This field is the factory end of the same wager: that the station he had finished as a civil servant would need a commercial successor, and that Houston should build it.

He stepped down as chief executive on 9 August 2024, citing personal reasons, and stayed on the board.

Ghaffarian served as interim chief until the company named a successor.

The spaceport lot is a public airport property, not a private house.

A visitor can stand at the Ellington fence and see the high bay that is meant to send the next modules up.

Photo: Bill Abbott, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (NASA T-38 at Ellington Field, 2002)