Wednesday, September 15 could be a historic day, given 4 civilians they are preparing to be released aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for a three-day mission into low Earth orbit. You can watch the mission live right here.
Earlier this year, both Virgin Galactic how Blue origin send totally civilian crews to the edge of space. Now is the time for the next giant leap, with SpaceX preparing to send a fully civilian crew into Earth orbit. This had never happened, as all pre-manned orbit trips included at least one professional astronaut employed by the government.
The five-hour launch window begins at 08:02 am EDT (Thursday, September 16 at 00:02 UTC). The all-civilian crew of four (Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroki) will sit inside a specially modified SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. A reusable Falcon 9 rocket will take off from the 39A launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, taking the crew into low Earth orbit.
You can see the release at the web of SpaceX, but you can hang out here and watch the live stream provided below. The webcast is scheduled to begin at 3:45 pm EDT (7:45 pm UTC), ie 4 hours and 15 minutes before takeoff.
There is a 70% chance of weather conditions favorable for today’s release. If it is postponed for any reason, SpaceX will try again tomorrow (Thursday, September 16) at the same time.
G / O Media may receive a commission
a program produced by Netflix will begin at 7:00 pm EDT (11:00 pm UTC). Queer Eye’s Karamo Brown and journalist Soledad O’Brien will present the live YouTube special, and will feature a host of celebrity appearances. The Netflix series Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space has been following the training of the crew, with episodes one to four already available on the service. The fifth and final installment will premiere in late September.
Isaacman, the billionaire founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, will be in charge of the mission, while Proctor, a teacher of geosciences, will act as a pilot. Arceneaux, a pediatric cancer survivor, will be the first person to go into space with a prosthetic body part and the youngest American to orbit the Earth. Sembroki is an aerospace engineer and veteran of the Air Force. The operation of the Crew Dragon is autonomous, so the crew is not expected to carry out any actual piloting.
SpaceX aims to deploy the Crew Dragon at an altitude of 575 km, which is higher than the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station. The crew will see Earth from the Dragon Dome, the “largest contiguous space window ever flown,” according to SpaceX. The company led by Elon Musk says the three-layer observation dome was “widely tested and qualified for flight” and replaces the mechanism used by Crew Dragon for docking on the ISS.
In addition to looking out the window and experiencing weightlessness, the crew will perform a series of health-related scientific experiments. Once the three-day space trip is over, Crew Dragon will make a re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere and make a parachute-assisted mooring at one of several possible locations along Florida’s east coast.
One of the main objectives of the mission Inspiration4 is to raise $ 200 million for the Hospital of Children’s Research St. Jude’s, and this is certainly a great cause. For SpaceX, however, the mission represents its first foray into space tourism, in which a lot of money is at stake. Isaacman paid an undisclosed amount for the four seats (Arceneaux was personally chosen by Isaacman, and both Proctor and Sembroki won contests to participate). seconds reports, SpaceX will charge about $ 50 million per seat for future private missions.
I’m looking forward to following the launch and events of the next three days, but at no point will I be fooled by the naive narrative that is floating around this mission: that space travel will soon be available to the rest of the world. We.