Hayley Arceneaux’s journey into space has begun.
Arceneaux, a Baton Rouge native, took off Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, as part of Inspiration4, the first orbital space flight in history without a professional astronaut on board. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket left the 39A launch complex, the starting point for many Apollo missions and space shuttles, at 19:03 pm CDT into an almost cloudless sky. They reached orbit less than 10 minutes later.
“I’m thrilled, excited,” said Colleen Arceneaux, Hayley’s mother. “I couldn’t be happier.”
“The guys at SpaceX said this was the best launch they’ve ever seen,” said Hayden Arceneaux, Hayley’s brother, who is an aerospace engineer. “There were no problems.”
Hayley Arceneaux, 29, joins philanthropic businessman Jared Isaacman, who paid an undisclosed sum to book the flight; the geoscientist Sian Proctor; and aerospace industry worker Chris Sembroki on a three-day trip 357 miles above the Earth’s surface.
As the brightness of the rocket engines went through the darkness, Arceneaux’s friends who had come to witness the moment were thrilled.
“We didn’t all expect to cry, but we all immediately had so much admiration that we all hugged and did a little boo,” said Courtney Major, who attended school with Arceneaux at St. Mary’s Academy. Joseph. and the University of Southeast Louisiana. “There were a lot of trades and ahs and mouthfuls of excitement around.”
Amanda Pittman, who joined Major and a dozen other friends watching from outside the Kennedy Space Center, said they had never imagined anyone knew she would go into space before Arceneaux broke the news. earlier this year.
“If anyone would, it would be Hayley,” Pittman said.
Arceneaux was chosen for its association with St. John’s Children’s Research Hospital. Jude of Memphis, Tennessee, who is the beneficiary of the $ 200 million fundraising goal of the space mission, half of which Isaacman has already contributed.
That Haley Arceneaux has jumped at the chance to travel into outer space is no surprise. She has already traveled to the five continents, riding a camel …
Unlike the short flights this summer that Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin took on their rockets that barely reached space, this flight will extend miles beyond the Space Station International and will splash out of Florida this weekend.
This height will give astronauts a view of the Earth that few have seen. Former NASA astronaut and administrator Charles Bolden made a mission to the Hubble Telescope.
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“It’s an impressive difference,” Bolden said in an interview on the SpaceX video an hour before launch. “I just hope they take the opportunity to suck it, enjoy it and visualize it so they can tell stories to their children and grandchildren and all the kids they know.”
The fully automated dragon capsule was previously used for the second SpaceX astronaut flight for NASA on the space station. Since this flight will not link to the space station, a large domed window has replaced the capsule coupling mechanisms. Isaacman, who is a military reaction pilot, is the captain.
Arceneaux, who grew up in St. Francisville, is the daughter of Colleen and the late Howard Arceneaux.
Since her diagnosis of childhood cancer, Baton Rouge native Hayley Arceneaux has been a spokeswoman for the way St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital …
She became a patient of St. Jude after being diagnosed with bone cancer in 2002, when he was 10 years old. His treatment in St. Jude included chemotherapy and a powerful surgery in which most of the femur was removed and replaced with a prosthetic device that can expand without further surgery as it grows.
While in St. Jude, Arceneaux became the organization’s ambassador, telling her story to raise money and raise awareness for the research hospital.
She returned to the hospital for continued care and became a summer intern in the Pediatric Oncology Education program in 2013 before becoming a medical assistant.
Arceneaux is the youngest American, the first survivor of pediatric cancer and the first person with an internal prosthesis to fly in space.
“Surviving cancer made it hard for me and I think it taught me a lot to get out of my comfort zone,” Arceneaux told CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell.
Arceneaux has been appointed as the crew’s medical officer and SpaceX says the crew will conduct scientific experiments during its three-day mission. Arceneaux said he plans to call her a St. Louis patient. Jude as it orbited the Earth.
Arceneaux has received the NOVA astronaut call signal, which he said does not mean any normal fox astronaut.
“They gave me a cheeky name because I’m a cheeky astronaut,” Arceneaux said.