SpaceX launches 4 fans on a private trip back to Earth

CAP CANAVERAL, Fla. – SpaceX’s first private flight went into orbit Wednesday night with two contest winners, a healthcare worker and their wealthy sponsor, the most ambitious leap in space tourism to date.

It was the first time a spacecraft orbited the Earth with a fully amateur crew and no professional astronauts.

“Punch it, SpaceX!” the billionaire leader of the flight, Jared Isaacman, urged moments before takeoff.

The two men and women in the Dragon capsule want to spend three days circling the planet from an unusually high orbit – 160 kilometers (160 kilometers) higher than the International Space Station – before exploding on the coast. of Florida this weekend.

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. Isaacman, just 38, made a fortune from a payment processing company that began in his teens.

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Joining Isaacman on the journey called Inspiration4, Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a survivor of childhood bone cancer who works as a physician’s assistant where she was treated, is 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.

Arceneaux became the youngest American in space and the first person in space with a prosthesis, a titanium wand on her left leg.

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.

Once opposed to space tourism, NASA is now in favor. “Low Earth orbit is now more accessible so more people can experience the wonders of space,” he tweeted to NASA administrator Bill Nelson, a congressman when he set off on a walk in a space shuttle decades ago.

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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.

Across the country, SpaceX employees at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheered wildly at every flight milestone, even as the first-stage booster landed vertically on an ocean platform. French astronaut Thomas Pesquet took root from the space station on Twitter: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional or not, when you bind yourself to a rocket and launch into space, we have something in common. The best of, well, the space ”.

Isaacman noted when he reached orbit that there were few people in space, less than 600 in 60 years. But he added: “Many are about to follow. The door is opening now and it’s pretty amazing.”

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Its 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.

An experienced pilot, Isaacman convinced SpaceX to carry the highest fully automated dragon capsule ever. 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 argue that these big price tags will eventually reduce the cost.

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“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 reunited with Musk before exiting SpaceX’s huge rocket hangar, greeting and kissing their families and company employees, before they were kicked out. be in their 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.

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Unlike NASA missions, the public will not be able to hear or see events 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.

“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.