This content was published on 12 September 2021 – 22:12
Miami (USA), Sep 12 (EFE) .- The first space mission composed entirely of civilians, called Inspiration4, will take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral (Florida) no earlier than 8:00 p.m. on September 15 (00:00 GMT September 16), 24 hours later than originally expected.
“This will give us extra time for final preparations, vehicle and data review,” Inspiration4 and Space X stressed in a statement released today.
An entrepreneur, an engineer, a medical assistant and an expert science educator will board SpaceX’s Dragon Resilience capsule in Cape Canaveral (Florida) on September 15, which will be launched into orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket from the same company.
The orbital trip, the first of a crew without astronauts and financed by the Israeli businessman Jared Isaacman, who will command the mission, will last three days and will end with the fall of the capsule into the Atlantic Ocean with the help of parachutes.
They will reach a height of almost 575 kilometers from Earth, higher than that of the suborbital trips that millionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson made this year aboard the ships of their respective private space companies.
Jared Isaacman, 38-year-old founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments and one of four crew members who will participate in the Inspiration4 mission, took over the other three passages.
The other crew members are Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a cancer survivor and an assistant physician at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, who will be the youngest person to fly into orbit space.
Also attending are university professor Sian Proctor and aerospace engineer and Air Force veteran Chris Sembroski.
The Inspiration4 crew has received commercial astronaut training from SpaceX on the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and the Dragon spacecraft, orbital mechanics, microgravity operation, zero gravity and other tests.
Civilians have been prepared for emergencies, spacecraft and spacesuit entry and exit exercises, as well as partial and full mission simulations.
This journey orbiting the Earth every 90 minutes along a custom flight path, will be carefully monitored at each step by SpaceX mission control.
The capsule will not have a docking ring near the nose this time because it will not be docked to the International Space Station (ISS).
Upon completion of the mission, Dragon will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere to land off the coast of Florida.
In 2020 SpaceX “returned the ability” to the United States to carry NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) from the US territory for the first time since the last space shuttle flight in 2011.
In addition to carrying NASA personnel, the Dragon spacecraft was also designed to carry commercial astronauts to Earth orbit, the ISS, or beyond. EFE
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