SpaceX launches Inspiration4 to orbit: Watch - The Washington Post
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Four amateur astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center here Wednesday evening, making history by becoming the first all-civilian crew to reach orbit in a fully commercial mission operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and paid for by a billionaire entrepreneur.
The launch, dubbed Inspiration4, was the first step in what is planned to be an audacious three-day journey in orbit around Earth by a group of people who just months ago didn’t know each other and didn’t expect to fly to space.
Just before launch, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire businessman who financed the trip and is its commander, urged action. “Inspiration4 is go for launch," he said. "Punch it, SpaceX.”
Upon reaching orbit, Isaacman said, “The door is opening now, and it’s pretty incredible.”
SpaceX confirmed late Wednesday that the spacecraft had hit an altitude of about 363 miles, exceeding the intended orbit of just under 360 miles.
The flight marks a new expansion in the growth of the commercial space industry and another leap forward by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has vowed to open the cosmos to ordinary people, not just professionals trained by the government, in a quest ultimately to land humans on Mars.
Civilians have in the past joined professional astronauts on trips to the International Space Station. And Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are working to fly paying customers on suborbital flights that would touch the edge of space before falling back to Earth. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
But never before has a crew made up entirely of civilians reached orbit — two of whom won their seats through a competition and sweepstakes.
Isaacman, a 38-year-old father of two, made his fortune by founding Shift4 Payments, a payments processing company. He is an accomplished pilot who flies fighter jets in aerobatic competitions. He paid an undisclosed sum for the mission, though he told Axios it was less than $200 million, and turned it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
His first pick to accompany him on the flight was Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.
The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot who is also an artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won a competition by using Shift4′s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. In it Proctor, who was a finalist for the NASA astronaut program in 2009, read a poem calling for what she called a J.E.D.I. future, which she described as Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
In a briefing for reporters before the launch, she said she was honored to be the fourth African-American woman to go to space and the first to serve as the pilot of a mission.
“It means that I have this opportunity to not only accomplish my dream, but also inspire the next generation of women of color and girls of color and really get them to think about reaching for the stars,” she said.
Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially selected for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski, who works at Lockheed Martin and served in the Air Force.
The Falcon 9 rocket that propelled the crew into space and the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will be their home until they splash down off the coast of Florida are owned and operated by SpaceX, not NASA. But the space agency has over the years invested heavily in the system, awarding SpaceX billions of dollars of contracts over the years so that the company could fly cargo and its astronauts to the station.
For this mission, however, NASA was merely a bystander.
The Falcon 9 lifted off at 8:02 p.m. from iconic pad 39 A, which SpaceX leases from NASA and was host to the Apollo 11 moon launch as well as many space shuttle launches.
The rocket crackled and roared as it streaked through the darkening sky, reverberating across a Florida Space Coast that is witnessing a resurgence of launches, reminiscent of the early days of the space program, when astronauts like John Glenn, Alan Shepard and Neil Armstrong took to the skies.
The crew of the Inspiration4 mission stands in stark contrast to those men — all white, all trained by the military and then chosen by NASA for their bravery and aptitude for the “right stuff.”
The Inspiration4 crew looks more like a slice of America, from different walks of life, of different ages and with different experiences, whose voyage to space was as much happenstance as design.
With this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits. The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.
In a Netflix series documenting the mission, Isaacman and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, “intuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.” But he added that it “will start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I’m not aware of in other subsystems.”
Another employee warned, “Yeah, it’s not one particular thing, it’s just opening Pandora’s box.”
At the preflight press briefing, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. “If we’re going to go to the moon again, and we’re going to go to Mars and beyond we’ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,” he said.
Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.
“Ultimately it’s about safety and reliability,” he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones it has been flying for NASA, “that’s not to say that you can’t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can …. Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we’d fly safely.”
But the flight won’t be easy.
Even professionally trained astronauts suffer from “space sickness” once they reach orbit, finding the weightless environment so disorienting many throw up. And while the crew has been trained in emergency procedures, it’s not clear how they’ll react if something goes wrong — whether they’ll be cool in the moment, or panic.
Though the launch went well, the crew still has three days inside a cramped spacecraft, where they’ll live, sleep and even go to the bathroom in proximity to each other. Then there’s the return. To get home, the spacecraft will have to slam back through the atmosphere, generating extreme temperatures that will engulf the capsule in a fireball.
In an interview last year, Musk acknowledged the risks anytime you put people on top of a rocket loaded with thousands of gallons of highly combustible propellant.
“It’s a scary thing to be launching people,” he said. “We’ve done everything we can to make sure that the rocket is safe and the spacecraft is safe. But the risk is never zero when you’re going 25 times the speed of sound, and you’re circling the Earth every 90 minutes.”
But if they are able to successfully complete the mission, it would go down as a historic flight and demonstrate that there is a growing business in space.
The flight precedes other private astronaut missions that are planned. Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, is chartering flights for customers who are paying around $55 million for a little over a week on the space station. But on those missions, the private astronauts would be accompanied by a former NASA astronaut.
Ultimately, SpaceX and other companies hope the prices will come down and that space will be open not only to the super wealthy — or lucky. Isaacman said that the Inspiration4 mission, then, is a first step in that direction.
“It’s just getting started,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”
Here’s what to know
- The launch was on time at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time. Because this mission isn’t docking with the International Space Station, SpaceX didn’t have to launch at a precise time and had set aside a five-hour window for the launch. The mission is scheduled to last three days before returning to a water landing in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean near Florida.
- None of the four crew members has been to space previously. The sponsor of the trip, and the commanding officer, is Jared Isaacman, 38, the billionaire founder of Shift4 Payments, who dropped out of high school to start his own business and is a trained pilot. How much he’s paid SpaceX for the trip hasn’t been made public.
- The mission was conceived as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children Research Hospital, to which Isaacman donated $100 million.
- The crew went through five months of training at SpaceX’s facility in Hawthorne, Calif., but it’s unlikely they’ll have to intervene to control the spacecraft during the three days they’ll be circling the globe. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is designed to operate completely autonomously and has flown many times to and docked with the International Space Station without any crew at all.
Another first for Elon Musk and SpaceX
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with a simple, but ambitious, goal: to get humans to Mars. Since then, the company has moved quickly in a step-by-step approach, first being able to fly rockets to orbit, then reusing them and then flying people.
Its first mission with humans on board came last year, when it flew a pair of veteran NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, in a test flight to the International Space Station. Since then, it has flown two more crews of NASA astronauts with international colleagues, all of them highly trained, government astronauts. And it has another flight for NASA scheduled on Oct. 31.
But Musk’s goal is to open space up to all sorts of people — not just astronauts chosen and trained by the government. The Inspiration4 mission, then, is a huge step toward that goal.
Dragon has separated and is now in orbit
The Dragon spacecraft carrying the crew of the Inspiration4 mission has separated from the rocket’s second stage and is now flying on its own in orbit. The spacecraft will fire its thrusters later to put itself in a higher orbit. If all goes to plan, Dragon will reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than both the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Liftoff
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Inspiration4 crew has lifted off from historic launchpad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
This flight pushes SpaceX’s limits
With this mission, SpaceX will be pushing the limits.
The flight is scheduled to reach an altitude of about 360 miles, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.
In a Netflix series documenting the mission, the trip’s sponsor, Jared Isaacman, and his team ask SpaceX about the feasibility of flying above the space station. An unnamed SpaceX employee responded by saying, “intuitively going slightly above would not present a problem.” But he added that it “will start to stretch our margins. And there may be other problems that I’m not aware of in other subsystems.”
Another employee warned, “Yeah, it’s not one particular thing, it’s just opening Pandora’s box.”
At a preflight press briefing Tuesday, Isaacman said that he wanted the mission to push the envelope. “If we’re going to go to the moon again, and we’re going to go to Mars and beyond we’ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone and take the next step in that direction,” he said.
Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said that his engineers studied the flight trajectory, looked at risks such as micrometeorites and debris, radiation exposure, the amount of propellant on the spacecraft and determined it was something they could do.
“Ultimately it’s about safety and reliability,” he said. While it is a different flight path than the ones SpaceX has been flying for NASA, “that’s not to say that you can’t go and do more, and you should go and do more when you can. ... Certainly, Dragon is capable of doing it. We did all the risk analysis to make sure that we’d fly safely.”
Here come the private astronauts
SpaceX now dominates both the public and private launch business.
After Inspiration4, SpaceX has a more traditional launch for NASA in which it will fly three NASA astronauts, Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, to the space station — as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.
But it intends to stay in the private astronaut flight business for some time.
Working with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, SpaceX is planning to fly a crew of four to the International Space Station, where they would spend a little more than a week. Led by former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, the crew members have paid $55 million each for the trip. They are Larry Connor, the managing partner of the Connor Group, a real estate investment firm based in Ohio; Mark Pathy, the chief executive of Mavrik, a Canadian investment firm; and Eytan Stibbe, a businessman and former Israeli air force fighter pilot.
After their flight, the company will fly John Shoffner, the founder of Dura-Line, a developer of materials and methods for laying fiber-optic cable, with operations in more than a dozen countries. He’ll be accompanied by Peggy Whitson, a NASA veteran who spent 665 days in space, more than any other American. She was the first female commander of the International Space Station and the first woman to serve as chief astronaut before her retirement. Their flight is tentatively scheduled for fall of 2022.
SpaceX is also planning to fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and a crew chosen through an application process, who’ll fly on a trip around the moon on the company’s still-under-development Starship spacecraft. The flight is tentatively scheduled for 2023, but it’s not clear whether Starship will be ready by then.
Where are they going?
Unlike previous missions with private astronauts on board, the Inspiration4 crew will not visit the International Space Station, the orbiting laboratory. Instead, the crew will stay inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which has about as much room as a large SUV, whizzing in orbit around the Earth at 17,500 mph.
If all goes according to plan, they’ll fly higher than the space station and even higher than the Hubble Space Telescope. If they reach their planned altitude of about 360 miles, they’ll have gone higher than any human spaceflight mission to Earth’s orbit except Gemini 10 and 11 in 1966, according to Robert Pearlman, the editor of collectSPACE.com, a space history news site.
And they’ll have an added bonus. In addition to the windows of the capsule SpaceX is attaching a clear dome at the top that the astronauts will be able to stick their heads into and get an unobscured view of the solar system.
Normally that space is where the docking mechanism is for the spacecraft. But since Dragon is not docking with the space station, SpaceX put the dome in instead.
What the crew will be doing while in space
No doubt the crew will spend a lot of time looking out the window, participating in what astronauts call Earth-gazing. They also should have fantastic views of the solar system.
In a preflight briefing on Tuesday, Chris Sembroski said he was looking forward to bonding with his crew members.
“It’s going to be fun,” he said. “It’s like an extended camping trip, like you’re in a camper van with some of your closest friends for three days. You’re allowed to sleep in sleeping bags at night just like any other camping trip.” Though he said they would need to be careful not to “float into each other in the middle of the night.”
The crew will also be conducting science experiments designed to “increase humanity’s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body,” according to a news release.
SpaceX is working with the Translational Research Institute for Space health at Baylor College of Medicine and investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine to collect biological samples from the crew before, during and after the flight.
As a result of the experiments, scientists hope to better understand how space affects sleep, heart rate and blood-oxygen saturation. They will also assess changes in behavioral and cognitive performance, and scan organs using a small handheld ultrasound device.
A short history of space tourism
The Inspiration4 mission may be the first time a spaceflight crew is comprised entirely of civilians — nongovernment astronauts. But there has been a long history of ordinary citizens going to space. In fact, that was NASA’s goal at the beginning of the space shuttle era — to fly regular people on a routine basis.
First a teacher would fly, then a journalist and then possibly an artist.
Before people from those professions could fly, a couple of congressmen went first, then-Sen. Jack Garn (R) and then-Rep. Bill Nelson (D), who now serves as the NASA administrator.
In 1986, NASA flew the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, from Concord, N.H. After her selection, she’d quickly become an inspiration to school children across the country and was a source of optimism that soon many others like her would get the chance to go to space.
But she and the six other members of her crew were killed when the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center. NASA ended its “spaceflight participant program” and never flew the journalist or the artist.
In the 2000s, eight wealthy individuals paid $20 million or more for rides to the space station, flying on Russian spacecraft, since NASA prohibited the practice. The space agency has since changed course and is now allowing private citizens to book rides to the station on SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies that hold the contracts to fly crewed missions there.
SpaceX is go for propellant load
The SpaceX launch director has called for engineers to begin loading propellant, rocket-grade kerosene and liquid oxygen, a significant milestone that means things are progressing toward a launch. If all goes well, the launch could go within 45 minutes from the beginning of the loading sequence.
What’s the difference between Inspiration4 and the flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin?
The Inspiration4 mission marks a turning point in the idea of space tourism, but it is far more daring and dangerous than the rides Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are selling to the public.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will propel the Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where it will spin around the Earth so fast, at 17,500 mph, that it will circle the globe every 90 minutes. The crew intends to stay in space for three days before coming back to Earth and splashing down either in the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico.
Branson’s and Bezos’s flights are suborbital, meaning the rockets carries the crew straight up to scratch the edge of space, before falling back to Earth. The spacecraft never reaches orbit, instead spending just a few minutes out of the atmosphere, where the crew gets just a few minutes of weightlessness.
Still, they’ll be high enough to experience the wonders of space — to see the curvature of the Earth, the thin line of the atmosphere, land masses without borders and a dark sky full of stars even in daytime.
The four people aboard Inspiration4, however, will be five times as high and weightless not for minutes but days. They’ll be able to drink in views of Earth and the stars for hours and see multiple sunrises and sunsets every day.
What’s NASA’s role in this?
The Inspiration4 mission is a purely commercial mission. The rocket and spacecraft are operated by a private company, SpaceX. Mission control is at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. Everyone there works for SpaceX.
The flight was paid for by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur.
For this launch, NASA is little more than a bystander.
Not that it’s had no role in developing SpaceX. NASA has invested heavily in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft with billions of dollars in federal contracts to develop them to fly cargo and crew to the International Space Station.
NASA also leases SpaceX launchpad 39A, the historic site from which the rocket will blast off. In the space world, 39A is sacred ground, the site where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lifted off to the moon in 1969. It’s also where many of the space shuttles launched.
Now it’s home to the first all-civilian crew launch.
This capsule has been to space before
The Dragon capsule that will carry the Inspiration4 crew to space has been there before. It was the vehicle used for SpaceX’s first operational human spaceflight mission for NASA in November.
On that flight, the capsule flew three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, on a trip to the International Space Station.
The astronauts dubbed the spacecraft “Resilience,” and said after the flight that it provided a nice ride to and from the station.
The crew spent about 27 hours inside the spacecraft as they made their way to the station, and reported that they were able to get some rest and were comfortable inside the climate-controlled cabin, which was kept at 75 degrees.
“It was a very nice night on board Resilience,” Hopkins told the ground at the time.
And after they returned to Earth after a six-month stay, Hopkins said he was grateful to the NASA and SpaceX teams that developed the spacecraft.
“I want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience,” he said. “It’s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. Finally, I would just like to say, quite frankly, y’all are changing the world. Congratulations. It’s great to be back.”
Benji Reed, SpaceX’s senior director of human spaceflight programs, said the spacecraft went through no major changes or upgrades since that flight, except for one. It now has a large clear window poking up through the top, where the docking adapter would normally go. Since the mission isn’t going to the station, the adapter wasn’t needed.
“The cupola is the main change that we made,” Reed said. “Otherwise it’s the same, very safe Dragon that we’re flying right now for NASA crews.”
Meet the crew of the historic Inspiration4 mission
The commander of the mission, Jared Isaacman, is a high school dropout turned billionaire entrepreneur and a hardcore aviation enthusiast who flies fighter jets but has never been to space before.
His company, Shift4 Payments, helped transform the way establishments process payments, and he has used the money he made from that to fund the first all-civilian flight to space. It’s not clear how much he paid for the flight, but it’s certainly in the tens of millions of dollars, if not more than $100 million.
Married and a father of two daughters, he lives in New York City. He pledged to make the flight more than just a joyride for himself and a few others, turning it into a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and donating the first $100 million himself.
The first member he picked to be part of the mission is Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old from Memphis who works as a physician assistant. As a child, she was treated for bone cancer at St. Jude and made it her goal to work there and help others. As a result of her cancer, she had to have a rod placed in her leg, making her the first person with a prosthetic to go to space.
The other crew members, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski, won their seats through competitions. Proctor, 51, a licensed pilot, artist, poet and college professor from Phoenix, won by using Shift4′s software to build an online store and create a video outlining her space dreams. Sembroski, a 42-year-old father of two from Everett, Wash., won by donating to the St. Jude fundraiser. A friend of his was initially chosen for the seat but backed out and offered it to Sembroski.
SpaceX’s Inspiration4 proceeding to launch
The crew arrived at launchpad 39A shortly before 5 p.m., took in views of the Florida Space Coast and then took an elevator to the top of the launch tower and boarded the Dragon spacecraft. They strapped in and checked to make sure the communications system worked.
Shortly after 6 p.m., SpaceX technicians closed the hatch to the spacecraft.
Engineers continued to monitor the health of the rocket and the weather, both of which were cooperating.
“All looking good for an on-time launch,” John Insprucker, SpaceX’s principal integration engineer said during the broadcast of the mission. “Falcon 9 looking good. Dragon looking good.”
If all goes to plan, the rocket will blast off at 8:02 p.m. But SpaceX has a five-hour launch window in case there are any delays.
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