First, Elon Musk’s SpaceX to send all civilian crew into Earth orbit

According to official forecasters, the five-hour launch window for “Inspire 4” opens at 8:02 p.m. (0002 GMT Thursday), and weather conditions remain good with an 80 percent chance of launch.

after a trip from SpaceX Boss Elon Musk, the crew climbed into white Teslas under sunny skies to applause from a small crowd, and headed to the facility where they would don their spacesuits.

A Falcon 9 rocket, with a Dragon capsule on top, will blast off from the famed Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the Apollo 11 mission once flew to the Moon.

The spacecraft’s trajectory will take it to an altitude of 357 miles (575 kilometers), which is deeper in space than the International Space Station (ISS).

After three days of orbiting the globe, the four-man crew, all American, will land off the Florida coast.

“The #Inspiration4 launch reminds us of what can be achieved when we partner with private industry!” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tweeted ahead of the launch.

Building commercial capability has been the vision of NASA’s commercial crew program since it was established in 2011.

– hard training –

The trip was paid for by billionaire Jared Isaacman, a 38-year-old high school dropout, founder of Shift 4 Payments, and an aviator.

SpaceX hasn’t disclosed what it’s worth, but the price tag is in the tens of millions of dollars. Isaacman’s three crewmates were selected through a competition, and their stories are followed in a Netflix documentary.

Pediatric cancer survivor Hayley Arsinox, 29, is a physician assistant. She will be the youngest American to attend the class and the first person to have a prosthesis on a part of her femur.

Chris Sambroski, 42, is a US Air Force veteran who now works as an aerospace data engineer.

Sean Proctor, a 51-year-old geologist and educator, was nearly selected to become an astronaut for NASA in 2009.

She will be only the fourth African-American woman to go into space.

They bonded over six months of training that included climbing Mount Rainier, high G-force conditioning, and experiencing a taste of weightlessness on a parabolic flight.

The mission is hoping to raise $200 million for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, a major facility in Tennessee. Arsinox treated there as a child, and now works there.

The crew will take a variety of items with them – a guitar, 66 pounds (30 kg) of hops intended for Space Bear and several digital assets known as non-fungible tokens – which will be auctioned for this reason.

During the flight, biological data, including heart rate and sleep, as well as their cognitive abilities, will be analyzed to study the health effects of spaceflight.

Dragon will be equipped for the first time with a domed observation dome – the largest space window ever built – for viewing. The dome replaces the normal mechanism used on Dragons to dock with the ISS.

– Privatization of space –

Beyond the charitable and scientific aspects, the mission’s stated goal is to represent a turning point in the democratization of space, by proving that the universe is accessible to those who have not been trained and trained for many years as astronauts. .

For SpaceX, this is the first step toward a multi-planetary humanity – the ultimate vision of founder and CEO Musk.

The flight should remain fully automated, but the crew has been trained by SpaceX to be able to take control in the event of an emergency.

The space adventure bookends a summer marked by the battle of billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos to reach the ultimate frontier.

Virgin Galactic founder Branson first achieved the feat on July 11, and was followed by Blue Origin boss nine days later.

But these flights only offered a few minutes of weightlessness. SpaceX’s mission is far more ambitious – although flights conducted by a private company contracting Russian Soyuz rockets took tourists to the ISS in the 2000s.

This will be the fourth crewed mission for SpaceX, which has now sent 10 astronauts to the ISS for the US space agency NASA.

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed.