CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) – SpaceX’s first private flight shot up Wednesday night with two contest winners, a health worker and its wealthy sponsor, the most ambitious leap in space tourism to date.
It was the first time a rocket had launched into orbit with a fully amateur crew, with no professional astronauts.
The two men and women in the Dragon capsule want to spend three days orbiting the world from an unusually high orbit (160 kilometers higher than the International Space Station) before exploding off the coast of Florida this weekend. .
At the helm of the flight is 38-year-old Jared Isaacman, who made a fortune with a payment processing company that began in his teens.
It is the first participation of SpaceX founder Elon Musk in the competition for space tourism dollars. Isaacman is the third billionaire to launch this summer, following the brief surface flights of Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin in July.
He joins Isaacman on the journey called Inspiration4: Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a survivor of childhood cancer who works as a physician’s assistant where she was treated, St. John’s Children’s Research Hospital. Jude of Memphis, Tennessee. Isaacman has pledged $ 100 million out of his pocket in the hospital and is looking for another $ 100 million in donations.
Also participating are raffle winners Chris Sembroki, 42, a data engineer in Everett, Washington, and Sian Proctor, 51, an educator at a community college in Tempe, Arizona.
Arceneaux will become the youngest American in space and the first person in space with a prosthesis, a titanium wand on his left leg.
The recycled Falcon rocket was fired from the same Kennedy Space Center pad used by the company’s three previous astronaut flights to NASA. But this time, the Dragon’s capsule was aimed at an altitude of 575 kilometers, just beyond the Hubble Space Telescope.
Its fully automated capsule has already been in orbit: it was used for SpaceX’s second astronaut flight for NASA on the space station. The only significant change is the large domed window at the top instead of the usual space station docking mechanisms.
Isaacman, an experienced pilot, convinced SpaceX to carry the Dragon’s capsule higher than it has ever been. Initially reluctant due to increased radiation exposure and other risks, SpaceX agreed after a safety review.
“Now I just wish we could push them to go higher,” Isaacman told reporters on the eve of the flight. “If we’re going to go to the moon again and go to Mars and beyond, we’re going to have to get a little out of our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction.”
Isaacman, the Shift4 Payments company based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, collects the entire flight record, but won’t say how many millions he paid. He and others advocate these big price tags that will end up reducing the cost.
“Yes, today you have to have and be willing to part with a lot of cash to buy yourself a trip into space,” said Explorers Club president Richard Garriott, son of a NASA astronaut who paid the Russians for a trip to the space station more than one a decade ago. “But this is the only way to reduce the price and expand access, as it has been before with other industries.
Although the capsule is automated, the four Dragon pilots spent six months training for the flight to deal with any emergency. This training included centrifugal and fighter jet flights, launch and re-entry practices in the SpaceX capsule simulator, and an exhausting ride down Washington’s Mount Rainier in the snow.
Four hours before takeoff, the four left SpaceX’s huge rocket hangar four hours before takeoff, greeting and kissing their families and company employees, before being kicked out for putting in her elegant white flight suits. Once on the launch pad, they posed for a photo and collided with their glove cuffs, before climbing the elevator. Proctor danced as he headed for the door.
Unlike NASA missions, the public will not be able to hear it, let alone watch the events unfold in real time. Arceneaux hopes to connect with patients from St. Jude, but the conversation will not be broadcast live.
SpaceX’s next private trip, early next year, will see a retired NASA astronaut escort three rich businessmen to the space station for a week-long visit. The Russians will launch an actress, a film director and a Japanese tycoon on the space station in the coming months.
Once opposed to space tourism, NASA is now in favor. The move from government astronauts to non-professionals “is simply disconcerting,” said former NASA administrator Charles Bolden, a former commander of the space shuttle.
“Someday NASA astronauts will be the exception, not the rule,” said Mason Peck of Cornell University, a professor of engineering who served as NASA’s chief technologist nearly a decade ago. “But they will probably continue to be the pioneers that the rest of us will follow.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.