Eytan Stibbe

Stibbe was born in Haifa in 1958 and spent several years in the United States during his childhood.[1] He attended high school in Ramat Gan, participated in the Scouts, and twice won the Israeli judo championship as a child.[1]

After completing flight school in 1978, Stibbe flew Skyhawk, Phantom, and F-16 aircraft in the Israeli Air Force.[5] During the 1982 Lebanon War, he shot down four enemy aircraft in a single sortie. He was one of four Israeli pilots credited with four shootdowns in one sortie and was reported as apparently the only F-16 pilot worldwide to have done so.[5] He served with Ilan Ramon in Squadron 117, where Ramon was his commander.[4][5] Stibbe retired as a reserve colonel after a military career reported as spanning 43 years, including dozens of operations and reserve service through 2019.[6][5]

After leaving active military service in 1984, Stibbe joined work on the Lavi aircraft project with two fellow former pilots.[1] In 1985, he, Ami Lustig, and Roy Ben Yami founded LR Avionics Technologies, later known as LR Group.[7] The company undertook infrastructure and other projects in developing countries, while Stibbe concentrated on arranging international project financing with banks and development institutions.[1] The partnership dissolved in 2011, when he reportedly sold his shares.[1][7]

Stibbe subsequently founded and chaired the impact-investment fund Vital Capital, whose work focused on Africa and infrastructure in underserved communities.[1][6] Its investments included electricity infrastructure, a hospital, and agribusiness in Angola.[7] He also held a stake in Mitrelli, which he sold in 2018.[1]

In 2010, Stibbe was among the friends of the Ramon family who helped establish the Ramon Foundation in memory of Ilan Ramon and his son Asaf.[4] He later worked on the foundation’s educational activities and guidelines.[4] Stibbe and his wife, Ora, also founded Anatta, a social-benefit company supporting social and educational initiatives in Israel, and established the Human Spirit Treatment Center in Lod to provide subsidized mental-health treatment to low-income clients.[4]

His friendship with Ramon helped shape his interest in spaceflight: Stibbe recalled visiting NASA’s Houston facilities and seeing a Columbia shuttle simulator, an experience that made space travel seem accessible to him.[8] His own decision to fly began with a conversation with astronaut Garrett Reisman, a friend who had worked on the design of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.[8] When Reisman asked whether he would go to space, Stibbe answered yes and then began to appreciate the scale of the commitment.[8]

The Israeli program, called Rakia, was organized through the Ramon Foundation and Israeli space and science authorities to advance research, support Israel’s space industry, and inspire young people.[2][9] Its name was chosen in a ministry poll and also echoed Ilan Ramon’s Hebrew rendering of “Imagine”; fragments of Ramon’s Columbia diary were published under the title Rakia.[10]

Stibbe envisioned the International Space Station as a laboratory whose opportunities should extend beyond conventional scientific disciplines to psychologists, philosophers, artists, and others.[8] Before departure, he said that roughly half his planned time would be devoted to experiments and half to Hebrew physics lessons for Israeli schoolchildren.[8] He trained with experienced astronauts in the procedures needed to conduct experiments in microgravity.[4]

The research program developed through several stages of selection and preparation.[9][11] In 2021, 44 projects from Israeli startups, universities, and hospitals were selected, with approximately 60 percent originating with university researchers; participation remained subject to funding, scheduling, and NASA approval.[9] The proposed work encompassed astrophysics, optics, engineering, medicine, renewable energy, and agriculture.[11] Early examples included testing a lithium-ion battery in microgravity, studying leukemia cells with and without chemotherapy, and investigating the production of high-quality optical lenses in space.[9] Before launch, the program comprised 35 selected experiments, including technology demonstrations, studies of scientific phenomena and theoretical mechanisms, and food and agriculture research.[12]

The launch was initially scheduled for March 30, 2022, and was postponed twice to allow additional prelaunch processing.[12] On April 8, Stibbe launched from Florida aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carried by a Falcon 9 rocket, serving as a mission specialist on Axiom Mission 1, or Ax-1.[2][3] Organized by Houston-based Axiom Space, Ax-1 was the first fully private mission to the International Space Station.[3][12] Commander Michael López-Alegría, an Axiom Space vice president, led the crew; Larry Connor served as pilot and Mark Pathy as the other mission specialist.[2][3] Connor was an American entrepreneur, while Pathy was a Canadian investor and philanthropist.[2]

The crew reached the station on April 9.[13] Stibbe became the second Israeli to travel to space, following Ilan Ramon, and the first Israeli to enter the station.[3] At the welcoming event, he spoke in Hebrew and remarked on the opportunity to speak the language there for the first time.[13]

Stibbe reported completing 34 experiments and technology demonstrations, with potential applications in medicine, astrophysics, agricultural technology, and communications.[2][11] His activities included making an optical lens from fluid, measuring brain waves, studying Alzheimer’s disease and childhood leukemia, attempting to grow chickpeas, testing a vest intended to shield astronauts from cosmic radiation, deploying a nano-antenna, and photographing atmospheric lightning.[14]

Rakia also connected students throughout Israel with activities aboard the station through an Israeli intermediary and in Hebrew, the first nationwide educational program of its kind.[2] Stibbe’s plans included reading the children’s story “Beauty of the World” from space and taking a scale model of the World Peace Bell.[12] Alongside his scheduled work, he observed Earth and lightning storms and worked on DNA, genes, and lens-making.[13]

The crew’s planned eight-day station stay was extended because bad weather delayed the return.[13][15] The additional time gave researchers more data and allowed further demonstrations.[13] The mission director credited Stibbe’s experience as a pilot with helping him follow procedures, communicate with control rooms, and handle problems.[13] The delay also meant that Stibbe celebrated the Passover seder in space.[13]

Ax-1 splashed down on April 25, 2022, after more than 17 days in space and more than two weeks aboard the station.[13] Stibbe gave his total time in space as 17 days, one hour, and 49 minutes.[11] He later recalled the seven-minute communications blackout during atmospheric re-entry, when he thought of Ilan Ramon and the Columbia crew and spoke with his crewmates.[11] After returning to Earth, he described difficulty walking while his body readjusted to gravity.[11]

Stibbe’s flight established the first Israeli presence aboard the International Space Station and linked Israeli research institutions, businesses, hospitals, and schoolchildren with a privately organized orbital mission.[2][3][9] Ax-1 also formed part of the broader expansion of private space missions.[2] Stibbe described his purpose as creating impact beyond space technology by encouraging children to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, while also inspiring artists.[8]

The mission’s name recalled the book published from surviving fragments of Ilan Ramon’s space diary.[10] Stibbe described Ramon as a close friend and said, “I feel that he is still with me.”[4] His keepsakes connected the flight with Jewish and Israeli identity and included a dreidel and a second-century coin from the Bar Kokhba Revolt.[4] The coin bore the name of the revolt’s leader, Shimon Bar Kokhba.[15]

During the flight, Stibbe participated from the station in a Zikaron BaSalon Holocaust-remembrance gathering, the first such event held beyond Earth’s atmosphere.[16] As a second-generation Holocaust survivor, he brought his mother’s sewing threads, preserved from a bag her parents had left her, among his personal keepsakes.[16]

His educational activity also included speaking to Space Gurion, the student-led space community at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.[17] The initiative’s activities included lectures, workshops, and networking events featuring figures from the space sector.[17]

Stibbe’s business background attracted scrutiny over LR Group’s sales of military equipment alongside its infrastructure and agricultural projects.[7] He acknowledged supplying two Sukhoi 27 aircraft to Angola, while his spokesperson disputed descriptions of the company as an arms dealer, said military sales represented less than one percent of revenue, and denied that Stibbe was personally involved in those deals.[7] The spokesperson emphasized the company’s agricultural infrastructure, water, and communications work.[7]

His privately financed spaceflight also prompted debate over the designation “astronaut” for paying participants rather than people selected for government-funded or government-sponsored missions.[7] Ramon Foundation director Ran Livne acknowledged that Stibbe’s wealth played a role in his selection but said the foundation had asked him to go for scientific and educational purposes.[7] Reported flight-cost estimates ranged from $50 million to $55 million; his payment went through the Ramon Foundation to Axiom Space, and he said he did not intend to seek a tax break.[7][10]

In a 2023 Israeli lawsuit, former LR partners Roy Ben-Yami and Ami Lustig accused Stibbe of misleading them and improperly taking control of business assets; his lawyers rejected the allegations as false.[18] A London arbitrator dismissed a related claim in 2025, but the parties disputed the decision’s scope: Stibbe’s lawyers said the claims had been rejected, while his former partners said the underlying allegations had not been decided and the Israeli case was separate.[18] The Israeli proceedings were still continuing at the time of that reporting.[18]