The first four civilians head into space Wednesday night: the first mission in history that will have no professional astronauts on board.
Starting shortly after 8 p.m., look southeast, initially low on the horizon. The rocket will move from right to left as it climbs the hill into orbit.
This release is not expected to be as prominent as the pre-dawn releases. This is because we will see the light of the setting sun reflected by the plume instead of shining from the rising sun.
Several WRAL viewers sent footage of the launch from their home. The following was taken by Allison Newell in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, is just the latest flight in what has been a busy year for private space flight companies, following the joys in suborbital space of billionaire businessmen Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos during the summer.
Billionaire Jared Isaacman is led by the historic all-civilian mission. Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, a 38-year-old Pennsylvania-based payment processing company, paid an unspecified amount for the three-day expedition to SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule.
Isaacman will be joined on the trip by Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a bone cancer survivor who now works as a physician’s assistant at St. John’s Children’s Research Hospital. Jude. Arceneaux, who will act as chief medical officer of the crew, will become the youngest American to fly into space.
Chris Sembroki, a U.S. Air Force veteran and 42-year-old aerospace data engineer, and Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and licensed pilot, will complete the 51-year-old crew.
Doctors at Duke Medical Center helped the historic team prepare for space emergencies.
“In space, if everyone works well other than micro-gravity, there’s really nothing to work on in terms of atmosphere,” Dr. Richard Moon told Duke.
He and his team trained the crew on how to react to low oxygen levels and how to operate at high altitudes.
The Inspiration4 crew was taken about 2,000 feet into the air to train in Duke Health’s hyperbaric chamber. The crew was given tasks such as writing, some calculations and a simple puzzle.
“Within minutes, everyone realized that when the oxygen level goes down, they’re not able to do things the way they should,” Moon said. “Interestingly, when that happens, people often don’t know there’s anything wrong.”
Moon says if an emergency occurs, this oxygen training would help them recognize it.
The Inspiration4 mission will resemble SpaceX’s routine flights to the International Space Station, unless this time the capsule will not dock in the orbiting laboratory. Instead, the spacecraft will orbit the planet 15 times a day from an altitude of nearly 360 miles, higher than the current orbits of the space station and the Hubble Space Telescope, according to SpaceX.
The Crew Dragon capsule will spend three days circling the Earth before re-entering the atmosphere and splashing into the Atlantic Ocean off the Florida coast, according to SpaceX.
Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, has said that while the first space tourism flights may be out of reach for all but the very rich, these pioneering missions will lay the groundwork for travel. in the most regular and affordable space in the future.