Miami, United States
SpaceX announced Monday that it will launch the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida later this year on the Inspiration4 mission, “the world’s first fully commercial astronaut” to orbit the Earth. for “several days.”
SpaceX said in a statement that the launch, with a crew of four civilians, will be from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Elon Musk’s company stressed that Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, one of the four crew members who will board Dragon, will donate the other three seats to the general public that will be announced in the coming weeks.
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The Inspiration4 crew will receive commercial astronaut training from SpaceX on the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and the Dragon spacecraft, orbital mechanics, microgravity operation, zero gravity and other tests.
Civilians will go through “emergency preparedness training, spacecraft entry and exit exercises and spacesuits, as well as simulations of partial and complete missions,” the statement said.
This multi-day journey, orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes along a custom flight path, will be carefully monitored at every step by the control of the SpaceX mission.
Once the mission is over, Dragon will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere to moor off the Florida coast. The company has specified that the mission will be carried out “not before the fourth quarter of this year”.
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He recalled that in 2020 SpaceX has “found the ability” of the United States to carry astronauts from NASA to and from the International Space Station (ISS) for the first time since the last flight of the space shuttle in 2011 .
He stressed that in addition to flying NASA personnel, Dragon was also designed to carry commercial astronauts into Earth orbit, the ISIS or beyond.
Last week the company Axiom Space announced to the crew that it will be part of the first private mission to the International Space Station (ISS), which will possibly arrive at the beginning of the year on board a capsule of the signature SpaceX.
Led by Hispanic-American Michael Lopez-Alegria, a former NASA astronaut who was already on four space missions, Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1) will depart from Cape Canaveral, Florida (USA) with the American Larry Connor, the Canadian Mark Pathy and the Israeli Eytan Stibbe on board.