If all goes according to plan, in just a few hours another billionaire will add his name to the very exclusive list of people who have traveled to space, a list that until 2018 it had only 553 people in it. Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, will lead the mission in which, along with other rookie astronauts, he will orbit the Earth for three days in a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
The C207 capsule – named Resilience – will be powered by the Falcon 9 B1062 rocket, which has already flown twice. The first mission was in November 2020 and the second a few months ago, in June. On both occasions, the booster propelled GPS satellites, so this will be its first manned flight.
Liftoff is scheduled for September 16 at 00:02 UTC from launch pad 39A. This is the same one used for all the missions (except Apollo 10) of the program that put mankind on the Moon for the first time. The launch window will be five hours and the weather is 70% go for launch. If the mission is successful, there will be three Dragon capsules in space simultaneously: Endeavor and C208 are installed on the International Space Station for the Crew-2 and CRS-23 missions, respectively.
This will be the first orbital flight since STS-125 (the last Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission performed by the shuttle Atlantis) in which a capsule will not visit the Space Station. Also, this mission will go down in history as the highest flight since the Apollo program ended. With an apogee (highest point above Earth) of 575 kilometers, it will orbit the planet beyond the International Space Station (nominal orbit of 410 kilometers) and Hubble (537 kilometers).
Crew and flight
Inspiration4 was conceived by Isaacman to raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a pediatric cancer center. As reported by Yahoo, he pledged to donate $100 million to the institute.
The Inspiration4 crew will not pilot the capsule, as it is fully autonomous. Two of the crew members, however, are rated pilots: Isaacman holds commercial and military aircraft licenses, same as Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old geologist who was once a NASA astronaut candidate. Proctor was selected through a competition organized by Shift4.
Rounding out the crew are 29-year-old Hayley Arceneaux, a bone cancer survivor and physician assistant at St. Jude, and Chris Sembroski, 42, a U.S. Air Force veteran and data engineer, who won his spot on the mission through a lottery with more than 72,000 applicants.
The four crewmembers have spent five months training with SpaceX. This will be the first space mission in history in which no crew members were trained at a government agency.
