This mission, called Inspiration4, is the first orbital mission in the history of space flight made up of tourists or other non-astronauts.
The launch is scheduled for Wednesday between 8:02 p.m. and 1:02 a.m. ET at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Brevard County, Florida, although forecasts closely monitor storms that could affect the mission.
The three-day journey will see the quartet flying freely through Earth’s orbit, circling the planet once every 90 minutes as passengers float, animated by microgravity, and contemplate panoramic views of our home planet. To end the trip, his spaceship will plunge back into the atmosphere to make a fiery re-entry and splash off the Florida coast. And yes, during the three days in space, all passengers will have to share a special zero gravity toilet located near the top of the capsule. There will be no showers available, and the crew will need to sleep in the same reclining seats they will ride in during the launch.
This is far from the first time civilians have traveled into space. Although NASA has been reluctant to target non-astronauts for routine missions after the death of Christa McAuliffe, a New Jersey schoolteacher who died in the 1986 Challenger disaster, a cohort of Emotion-rich seekers paid their own way to the International Space Station in the 2000s through a company called Space Adventures. American investment management billionaire Dennis Tito became the first to self-finance a trip in 2001 with his eight-day stay on the International Space Station and six more came after him. They all booked trips alongside professional astronauts on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
This mission, however, has been presented as the beginning of a new era of space travel in which the average people, instead of government-selected astronauts and the occasional deep-pocket adventurer, carry the mantle of exploration. spatial.
Here is a summary of what is happening and why it matters.
Passengers: a billionaire, a cancer survivor, a geologist and a raffle winner
- Jared Isaacman, 38, the founding billionaire of the payment processing company Shift4, which also personally funds this entire mission
- Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old cancer survivor who now works as a medical assistant at St. Jude, the hospital where she was treated, in Memphis, Tennessee. He will be the first person with a body prosthesis to go into space and will serve as chief flight doctor. St. Jude selected Arceneaux for this mission at Isaacman’s request, according to a Netflix documentary, and at the time said he was so unaware of space travel that he asked if he would travel to the moon, not knowing that humans would not. put your foot on the moon in 50 years.
- Sian Proctor, 51, a geologist and educator who was selected for a position on this mission through a publish on social networks in which his artistic work related to space and his entrepreneurial spirit stand out. She will be the only black woman in the United States to travel in orbit.
- Chris Sembroki, a 42-year-old Lockheed Martin employee based in Seattle and a former counselor at Alabama’s famous Space Camp. He won his place through a raffle in which he participated by donating to St. John’s Children’s Hospital. Jude, though he wasn’t the official winner. His friend grabbed the seat and, after deciding not to go, transferred it to him.
To date, a fundraiser has contributed $ 30 million of its $ 100 million goal.
How did all this happen?
Inspiration4 is completely the brainchild of Jared Isaacman and SpaceX.
Isaacman began flying single-engine aircraft with recreation in the mid-2000s and developed an insatiable thirst to go higher and faster, eventually switching to twin-engine aircraft, then aircraft, and then military aircraft that can overcome the speed of sound.
Each of Isaacman’s traveling companions was selected in a different way: he asked St. Jude selected a cancer survivor turned health care provider and the organization chose Arceneaux. Proctor won an online contest specifically for people using Shift4, the payment platform run by Isaacman. And a person who won a raffle of the people who gave St. Jude gave his place to Sembroki. (S Memberski also participated in the draw, but was not the original winner).
Isaacman told CNN Business that he sat down with SpaceX to analyze the flight profile. He specifically wanted the crew’s dragon to orbit higher than the International Space Station, so the spacecraft would orbit about 350 kilometers above Earth, about 100 kilometers above where the space station orbits.
How risky is that?
Every time a spacecraft leaves Earth there are risks and there are no perfect measures to predict them.
Because of the inherent risks of exploding a spacecraft at more than 17,500 miles per hour (the speed at which an object enters Earth’s orbit), Inspiration4 is more dangerous than the brief up and down suborbital excursions made by the spacecraft. billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. .
During a Netflix documentary about the Inspiration4 mission, Musk described a capsule that went through re-entry as “like a flaming meteor.”
“And so it’s hard not to vaporize,” he added.
Then the crew dragon must deploy parachutes to slow their descent and make a safe crash into the ocean before the rescue boats can take the four passengers ashore.
The vehicle: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon
The four passengers will pass all missions aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, a 13-meter-wide rubber-shaped spacecraft that comes off the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket after reaching orbital speeds.
Since then, SpaceX has launched two additional Crew Dragon missions for NASA.
However, SpaceX is allowed to sell seats (or entire missions) to whomever the company chooses. Although NASA paid for much of the development of the Dragon Crew, under the terms of the agreement between the federal agency and the company, SpaceX is still technically the owner and operator of the vehicle and may use it for any commercial purpose that wish.
Crew Dragon missions in the near future also include a mix of NASA-commissioned flights to the ISS and space tourism missions.
For this mission, the crew dragon will be equipped with a giant glass dome at the tip of the ship specifically so that the crew can immerse themselves in panoramic views of the cosmos.