The historic mission is aimed at taking off on Wednesday.
SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission may seem familiar, like another multimillionaire-supported space launch, but it goes where neither Richard Branson nor Jeff Bezos could go into orbit.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos ’Blue Origin sent civilians into space on brief suborbital flights that lasted only a few minutes.
But Elon Musk’s SpaceX is just days away from sending his first all-civilian crew on a three-day mission to Earth several times.
Inspiration4 will orbit 360 miles above Earth, higher than the International Space Station, without any professional astronauts on board. It will be the first orbital space tourism flight that does not have an astronaut to guide passengers during launch and landing.
At the head of the mission is billionaire Jared Isaacman, 38, an experienced pilot. He founded a payment processing company called Shift4 Payments and bought the four seats on the flight for about $ 200 million.
Isaacman wants this release to benefit St. John’s Children’s Research Hospital. Jude. He has already donated $ 100 million to the cause and raised an additional $ 13 million through a lottery to win a seat.
A seat was reserved for an ambassador from St. Jude: Hayley Arceneaux, 29 years old.
Arceneaux is a bone cancer survivor who was treated at St. Jude’s as a child and now works as a doctor’s assistant. She will be the youngest American to go into space and the first person with a prosthesis.
Chris Sembroki, 41, and Dr. Sian Proctor, 51, join Arceneaux and Isaacman on their journey.
Proctor said that since she was little she dreamed of going to space. She once applied to become a NASA astronaut and reached the final 47 of 3,500 applicants, but was eliminated from the final round. She burst into tears when she learned she was being chosen as a member of the Inspiration4 mission.
Sembroki is an Iraq war veteran and engineer with Lockheed Martin, who won the final place for the lottery that required a donation from St. Jude to enter.
The crew has gone through partial and complete mission simulations and has been trained by SpaceX in “the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and the Dragon spacecraft, including a specific focus on orbital mechanics, operating in microgravity, zero gravity and other forms. stress testing, ”according to a version of Inspiration4.
They will launch from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida (the same launch pad that launched Apollo 11) sending the man to the moon for the first time.
Inspiration4 aims for a release no earlier than 8 pm ET on September 15th. Since they don’t go to the International Space Station, they don’t need to launch them at any particular time.
The crew plans to bring objects aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft to auction off for the benefit of St. Jude, including patients ’artwork.
After three days of orbiting the Earth, they will prepare to sink in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Florida.
Gio Benítez of ABC News contributed to this report.