They will receive emergency preparedness training, spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises, as well as partial- and full-mission simulations. Upon conclusion of the multi-day journey, Dragon will reenter Earth's atmosphere for a soft water landing off the coast of Florida. The mission will be commanded by Jared Isaacman, the 38-year-old founder and Chief Executive Officer of Shift4 Payments and an accomplished pilot and adventurer. Named in recognition of the four-person crew that will raise awareness and funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, this milestone represents a new era for human spaceflight and exploration.
The Inspiration4 crew will receive commercial astronaut training by SpaceX on the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft, orbital mechanics, operating in microgravity, zero gravity, and other forms of stress testing. They will go through emergency preparedness training, spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises, as well as partial and full mission simulations. Of course, their journey did not start on launch day, with cameras documenting the team's every move from January on as they trained for a multi-day trip orbiting Earth. SpaceX will provide commercial astronaut training to the Inspiration4 crew on the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft, orbital mechanics, operating in microgravity, zero gravity, and other forms of stress testing. As none of the four participants has any prior formal astronaut training, the flight has been called the first "all civilian" space mission.
While the rocket and crew capsule are both fully automated, no one on board will need to control any part of the launch or landing. However, the four members still needed to go through much more training than the people on the suborbital flights. In less than six months, the crew has undergone hours of training, lessons in flying a jet aircraft and spent time in a centrifuge to prepare them for the G-forces of launch. "Once Dragon returns the Crew-1 astronauts back home to Earth, the SpaceX team will inspect and refurbish the spacecraft ahead of the Inspiration4 mission." The company's spacecraft will be commanded by Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments.
The mission, known as Inspiration4, seeks to raise support for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Isaacman is donating the three accompanying seats on the mission "to crew members who will be selected to represent the mission pillars of leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity," SpaceX said in a press release. This month, however, the general public has the chance to win an all-expenses-paid ride to space, courtesy of Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of tech company Shift4 Payments. The 37-year-old billionaire has essentially chartered a flight to space as a fundraising effort for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Dubbed Inspiration4, the mission will be a several-day orbital journey aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, and it could launch as soon as October. The mission is set to launch on Sept. 15 on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and all crew members will undergo commercial astronaut training, SpaceX said. Fortunately, this is a SpaceX rocket launch, at its core, and the private space flight company is very liberal with its coverage, offering livestreams of its launches on its website and YouTube channel. Once that channel goes live, we'll have it right here on September 15th so you can watch the historic flight unfold along with breaking news and updates from us as the mission progresses. Musk's company has announced several private missions in the past few years, including a deal with Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to fly on the company's Starship rocket on a trip around the moon in 2023. As an experienced pilot, including qualification in multiple military jets, and as the financial backer for the flight, Jared Isaacman will be the flight's commander .
Isaacman purchased two of the other seats for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. One of those two seats will be filled by Hayley Arceneaux , 29 years, a St. Jude employee and former bone cancer patient, now a physician assistant at St. Jude Hospital. The other is Christopher Sembroski , who donated and participated in the raffle as part of an attempt to raise US$200 million for the hospital.
Sembroski's raffle ticket was not selected but an unnamed friend of his from Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University, who was initially selected to fly but declined for personal reasons, gave his seat to Sembroski. The fourth crew member, Sian Proctor , is an entrepreneur who was selected using a format similar to the reality television series Shark Tank. The panel of judges for the fourth seat included Marc Benioff, Stephanie Mehta, Mark Rober, and Jon Taffer.
The mission, financed by Shift4 entrepreneur and billionaire Jared Isaacman, will launch him and three others on a three-day orbital mission on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon Resilience. Isaacman will be joined by geoscientist Sian Proctor as pilot; and bone cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux and data engineer Chris Sembroski as mission specialists. Arceneaux, who works with St. Jude Children's Hospital, was selected for the flight, with Proctor and Sembroski nabbing their seats as part of an online contest. One crew member, Sian Proctor, won a contest among people who use Isaacman's online payment company.
Another unique aspect of the mission is that one of its goals is to raise awareness of and funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Another crew member--Hayley Arceneaux, a physician's assistant at St. Jude and childhood cancer survivor, to participate in the launch. The fourth member-- Christopher Sembroski won his seat when his friend was chosen in a charity raffle for St. Jude and offered his seat to Sembroski.
The quartet will be the first all-civilian crew in space, riding in the SpaceX Dragon Resilience, which previously flew on the Crew-1 mission for NASA to the International Space Station. It will launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket from KSC's Launch Pad 39-A targeting liftoff no earlier than 8 p.m. The exact window has yet to be announced by SpaceX, but will be narrowed down to five hours within three days of launch.
Plans are for the flight, which will orbit at 335 miles altitude, to last three days before returning to a yet-to-be-determined splashdown site off the coast of Florida either in the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico. A Chinese Long March 2F rocket will launch the Shenzhou 13 spacecraft with three Chinese astronauts to rendezvous and dock with the Chinese space station in low Earth orbit. This is China's eighth crewed space mission, and the second to the Chinese space station. The four-person crew consists of a billionaire, a physician-assistant, an engineer, and a scientist. On Wednesday, weather permitting, they'll climb aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship atop a Falcon 9 rocket, then roar into space. They're set to orbit Earth for three days, enjoying the views and collecting data for scientific research, then plummet back through the atmosphere and parachute to a safe landing.
Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, is donating the three seats alongside him aboard Dragon to individuals from the general public who will be announced in the weeks ahead. Learn more on how to potentially join this historic journey to space by visiting Inspiration4.com. While SpaceX was first getting off the ground—figuratively and literally—Jared Isaacman, then a teenager, was building the fortune that would eventually afford him a commander's spot on the company's first all-civilian flight. Isaacman first got in touch with SpaceX and other commercial space firms back in 2007, telling them he would be willing to purchase tickets aboard a spaceflight when they became available. But the Inspiration4 mission itself didn't come together until after SpaceX launched two NASA astronauts to the ISS in June 2020—becoming the first private company to do so—and its subsequent launch of a full four-person crew five months later. Issacman and SpaceX began planning the Inspiration4 launch shortly after those trial runs, announcing the mission in February of this year.
The prospect of space travel will feel much different after the Inspiration4 mission—the first orbital mission with an all-civilian crew—launches this fall. Once that happens, the history of human spaceflight will instantly be divided into two eras. There will have been the six decades after the first human circled above the Earth in 1961, when orbital space was mostly a realm solely for nation-states and their hand-picked astronauts.
And then there will be the post-2021 era following Inspiration4, when space travel will come definitively within the grasp of private corporations and citizens—an era in which, for the right price, anyone can look down at our blue marble from orbit. The team have spent months preparing for the trip, undergoing training run by SpaceX. All crew members will undergo commercial astronaut training provided by SpaceX aboard the Falcon 9 vehicle and the Dragon spacecraft. The mission will be commanded by Jared Isaacman, the founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments who also happens to be an accomplished pilot and philanthropist. The 37-year-old is donating the three seats alongside him to crew members who will be selected "to represent the mission pillars of leadership, hope, generosity and prosperity," according to a SpaceX press release. The crew is made up of billionaire entrepreneur (we know, we know, it's different this time, we promise) Jared Isaacman, geoscientist Sian Proctor, childhood cancer survivor and physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, and data scientist Chris Sembroski.
In June 2019, NASA and its partners announced that the ISS would be opened up tovisits from private citizens. For Axiom, this was the opportunity for its astronauts to learn what it's like to travel into space and live and work in an orbital space station. In his 1979 book of the same name, Tom Wolfe described astronauts as needing the "right stuff"—meaning they had to be in top physical and mental shape to withstand the rigors and dangers of space travel. In the days of the Apollo missions, you had to be an experienced pilot to stand much chance of getting into the program. But the idea of commercial space travel always promised that one day, you wouldn't have to be a professional astronaut to go to space. The three additional crew members have been chosen by their relation to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital or Isaacman's company Shift4.
A goal of the mission is to raise $100 million in private donations for the hospital, supplemented by an additional $100 million donation by Isaacman. The groundwork that led to Inspiration4 was laid more than two decades ago. The market for private civilian spaceflight was opened by Dennis Tito, an American investment manager who in April 2001 paid $20 million to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket, becoming the world's first space tourist. A little over a year later, Elon Musk, then a successful software entrepreneur, founded SpaceX, whose two-stage, reusable Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft will bring Inspiration4's crew into orbit. This will be the second flight of the spacecraft, which first flew as part of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on 2 May 2021.
SpaceX has also installed a custom camera inside the retractable nosecone covering the cupola. The camera will also be stowed inside the nosecone during ascent and reentry. In just the right alignment, the camera should be able to take pictures of Dragon's four astronauts, Earth, space, and the stars. C207 will also fly twice in approximately 136 days, beating a 227-day turnaround record set just weeks prior by 91 days (41%) by C206 Endeavour. He will also offer additional support to the St. Jude fundraising effort in the form of other prizes, including flights in a military jet and flight gear.
An accomplished pilot rated to fly commercial and military aircraft, Isaacman holds several world records including a Speed-Around-The-World flight to raise money and awareness for the Make-a-Wish Foundation. He has flown in over 100 airshows as part of the Black Diamond Jet Team, dedicating every performance to charitable causes. In 2011, Isaacman co-founded what would become the world's largest private air force, Draken International, to train pilots for the United States Armed Forces. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, mission.
The mission seeks to test and validate a method to protect Earth in case of an asteroid impact threat. The mission aims to shift an asteroid's orbit through kinetic impact — specifically, by impacting a spacecraft into the smaller member of the binary asteroid system Didymos to change its orbital speed. The Ax-1 crew will be trained for this environment at Johnson Space Center, where NASA has a full mockup of the ISS interior.
In the future, Axiom wants to move this type of training in house, and center it specifically on the company's own space station environment. Other training centers, like NASTAR, run human centrifuge facilities that expose trainees to the elevated g-forces experienced during launch and reentry. King says the NASTAR Center has already started training some private astronauts who have disabilities . One of Inspiration 4's confirmed crew members is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude's hospital who survived bone cancer as a child. Her treatment included a dozen rounds of chemotherapy as well as the placement of a titanium rod in her left thigh bone. The crew is composed of wealthy entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, 38, who is using the mission to raise funds for St. Jude Children's Research hospital.
An experienced non-professional pilot, he will be spacecraft commander. He is taking three people with him and says the four-person crew represents the mission pillars of Leadership, Hope, Generosity, and Prosperity. After its third successful mission sending astronauts to the International Space Station, SpaceX has shown it can reliably bring people into Earth's orbit.
Next week, Elon Musk's space-faring firm plans to take this to a new level with the launch of the first all-civilian mission to space. In 2020, SpaceX returned America's ability to fly NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station for the first time since the Space Shuttle's last flight in 2011. In addition to flying astronauts for NASA, Dragon was also designed to carry commercial astronauts to Earth orbit, the space station, or beyond. Elon Musk's SpaceX is a big player in Inspiration4, training the astronauts, launching the crew and monitoring the mission as it progresses. Issacman may be captaining the spacecraft while the team is in orbit, but for all intents and purposes, SpaceX will serve as travel planners, airline, autopilot, control tower, and return welcome party.
This milestone SpaceX launch marks the first all-civilian mission to orbit. Commanded by Jared Isaacman, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Shift4 Payments and a pilot and adventurer, Inspiration4 will carry a crew of four into low Earth orbit for multiple days. The mission's goal is to raise awareness and funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Inspiration4 mission crew will be the first to use the cupola, which has been mated to Crew Dragon Resilience for its first mission.
Its location is near the Dragon toilet and so is a good feature for the crew. It is sent to space inside the Dragon's reusable or retractable nosecone and will be returned again stowed inside the nosecone after completion of Dragon Mission. That way, the cupola and the docking port won't have to be constantly swapped back and forth between launches. For missions to the ISS, SpaceX can then use Crew Dragons, Endeavour and C210, the latter of which will not be operational until the fall as part of the Crew-3 mission. Though the nosecone has modified duties, it still houses the forward Draco thrusters.
To prevent the thrusters from damaging the cupola, four black heat shields were placed on the exterior which will protect the cupola from the heat of Dragon's four Draco thrusters. It took just six months for the cupola to be proposed, tested, and installed for its first operational mission. The cupola's glass is not divided into sections like the ISS cupola; instead, it is a single monolithic hemispheric glass bowl. The cupola on Dragon is even big enough for two people at once and is made of two layered acrylic glass called plexiglass. Inspiration4 (or Inspirati④n) is a spaceflight planned for four people aboard the SpaceX Resilience capsule on 16 September 2021.
The three-day flight will be the first human spaceflight to orbit Earth with exclusively private citizens on board. The flight will be privately operated by SpaceX using a previously-flown Crew Dragon capsule launched to low Earth orbit. The flight will be sponsored by Jared Isaacman, who will be on the flight along with Hayley Arceneaux, Christopher Sembroski, and Sian Proctor.
Flying on the Inspiration4 mission will be billionaire entrepreneur and mission commander Jared Isaacman, and geoscientist and science communicator Sian Proctor will serve as the mission's pilot. Also on board are physician assistant Hayley Arcenaux, serving as the chief medical officer, and data engineer Chris Sembroski as a mission specialist. The purpose of the mission is to raise funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Mission managers met Thursday (Sept. 9) to perform a standard flight readiness review before flight, along with receiving an initial weather briefing.
Elon Musk and SpaceX announced on Monday that they will send the first-ever fully commercial, non-government space flight into orbit by the end of the year, using the company's four-seat Crew Dragon capsule for the journey. — An entrepreneur, a billionaire, a cancer survivor and an Air Force veteran have been selected as the crew members for Inspiration4's all-civilian flight to space — the first of its kind to ever be embarked upon. – An entrepreneur, a billionaire, a cancer survivor and an Air Force veteran have been selected as the crew members for Inspiration4's all-civilian flight to space — the first of its kind to ever be embarked upon. Inspiration4 marks the first orbital crewed mission where all of the astronauts are private citizens.
The four person crew is comprised of four civilians, who have never been to space before. Sian Proctor, an entrepreneur, educator and trained pilot, and Christopher Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin employee and U.S. Air Force veteran, will join the four-person crew that will orbit the Earth for several days aboard a Crew Dragon capsule in September as part of a fundraising campaign St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the company said in a statement.
Also setting Insporation4 apart from other space missions is the passel of goodies the crew can bring with them to space that will be auctioned off with proceeds going to St. Jude. NASA astronauts head to the space station are allowed to bring along 3.3 lbs. Of personal items, with the rest of the cargo load set aside for science experiments and essential supplies. The mission itself, which has been approved by NASA, will see SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft and its Falcon 9 rocket launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft will circle Earth for multiple orbits—roughly one every 90 minutes, according to SpaceX—for two to four days.
