Crew Vehicle Prepares for Blastoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday
Yet another billionaire entrepreneur is set to take a ride into space this week, tied inside the capsule of a SpaceX rocketship, set to make history as part of an astro-tourist team that launched into Earth orbit. Ready to make history as the first all civilian party to go.
Jared Isaacman, American founder and chief executive of e-commerce firm Shift 4 Payments, will lead three fellow spacecraft novices, which are expected to last three days from blastoff in Cape Canaveral, Florida, to splashdown across the Atlantic.
The 38-year-old tech mogul has given fellow billionaire and SpaceX owner Elon Musk an unspecified but possibly exorbitant amount to fly Isaacman and three specially selected travel companions into orbit aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
The crew vehicle prepares for blastoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center atop one of Musk’s reusable Falcon 9 rockets, with a targeted 24-hour launch window that opens Wednesday at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT). Is. That window will be narrowed, or possibly replaced, a few days earlier, depending on the weather.
Dubbed Inspiration4, the orbital outing was conceived by Isaacman primarily to raise awareness and support for one of his favorite causes, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a leading pediatric cancer center. He has personally pledged $100 million to the institute.
But a successful mission would also help usher in a new era of commercial space tourism, with many companies vying for wealthy customers willing to pay a small fortune to experience the supersonic flight, weightlessness, and visual spectacle of space. are in.
Determining an acceptable level of consumer exposure is also important in an inherently dangerous endeavor of rocket travel, and raises a burning question.
“Do you have to be both rich and brave to board these flights right now?” Sridhar Taiyur, professor of operations management and new business models at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said in an interview with Reuters on Friday.
billionaires beyond the space race
SpaceX is easily the best-established player in a growing group of commercial rocket ventures, having already launched multiple cargo payloads and astronauts for NASA to the International Space Station.
Rival companies Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin both recently celebrated their first astro-tourism mission with their respective founding executives — billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos — each going along for the ride.
But those two high-profile flights were largely suborbital, sending their crew of civilian astronauts into space and back within minutes.
SpaceX’s flight is designed to carry four of its passengers where no civilian crew has gone before – in Earth orbit.
There, they will circle the globe every 90 minutes at more than 17,000 miles per hour, or about 22 times the speed of sound. The target altitude is 575 kilometers, or about 360 miles high, beyond the orbits of the International Space Station or even the Hubble Space Telescope.
Like Blue Origin, the 20-story-tall SpaceX launch vehicle and crew capsule will take off vertically from the launch pad on a fully ground-guided flight.
In contrast, Branson’s suborbital rocket plane had two highly trained pilots in control as it carried its four rear-seat passengers 50 miles high.
Despite some largely honorary titles, the Inspire 4 crew will have no role in the operation of their spacecraft, although two members – Isaacman and geoscientist Sean Proctor – are licensed pilots.
Isaacman, who is rated for flying commercial and military jets, assumed the role of mission “commander”, while Proctor, 51, once a NASA astronaut candidate, was designated as the mission “pilot”. has gone. He was selected to join the team through an online contest run by Shift4 Payments.
Ejecting the crew are “Chief Medical Officer” Hayley Arsinaux, 29, a bone cancer survivor who became an assistant to St. Jude Physicians, and Mission “Specialist” Chris Sambrowski, 42, a US Air Force veteran and aerospace data engineer Huh. He won a seat in a sweepstakes that attracted 72,000 applicants and raised more than $100 million in St. Jude charities.
Four of the crew have undergone rigorous preparations over the past five months, including altitude fitness, centrifuge (G-force), microgravity and simulator training, emergency drills, classroom work and medical exams.
Inspiration4 executives emphasize that the mission is much more than a joyride. Once in orbit, the crew will conduct medical experiments with “potential applications for human health on Earth and during future space flights,” the group said in its press materials.
Appearing in a promotional clip for a Netflix documentary series on the mission, Arkinex said that a big part of his inspiration was to instill hope in his cancer patients.
“I’m showing them what life after cancer can look like,” she said.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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