SpaceX’s all-civilian team safely returns to earth after 3-day space flight
20 Sep 2021
After three days orbiting Earth in SpaceX’s Inspiraton4 mission to low orbit space, four space tourists safely ended their trip to orbit on Sunday with a splashdown in the Atlantic off the Florida coast, giving SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk an edge over rivals Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, who accomplished the first two human space flight in July.
The Dragon capsule they were travelling parachuted into the ocean just before sunset, not far from where their chartered flight began three days earlier. The all-amateur crew was the first to circle the world without a professional astronaut.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carrying the fully automated Dragon capsule reached an unusually high altitude of 585 km (363 miles) after Wednesday night's liftoff.
The Dragon capsule also accomplished the world’s first all-civilian mission to orbit with the splash-down off the coast of Florida at 7:06 pm EDT on Saturday, completing their first multi-day low Earth orbit mission.
Spacex’s Dragon capsule performed a series of departure phasing burns to leave the circular orbit of 575 km and then jettisoned its trunk ahead of deorbit burns. After re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft deployed its two drogue and four main parachutes in preparation for the soft water landing.
Upon splashdown, the Inspiration4 astronauts were welcomed home by the SpaceX team and quickly brought on board the recovery vessel. SpaceX will transport Dragon back to Cape Canaveral for inspections and refurbishment ahead of future human spaceflight missions.
Inspiration4 was commanded by Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments and an accomplished pilot and adventurer. Joining him were Medical Officer Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital and pediatric cancer survivor; Mission Specialist Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace data engineer; and Mission Pilot Sian Proctor, a geoscientist, entrepreneur, and trained pilot.
The four space tourists had spent six months training and preparing for potential emergencies during the flight, dubbed Inspiration4. Almost everything appeared to go well, leaving them time to chat with St. Jude patients, conduct medical tests on themselves, ring the closing bell for the New York Stock Exchange, and do some drawing and ukulele playing.
Arceneaux, the youngest American in space and the first with a prosthesis, assured her patients, "I was a little girl going through cancer treatment just like a lot of you, and if I can do this, you can do this." They also took calls from Tom Cruise, interested in his own SpaceX flight to the space station for filming, and the rock band U2's Bono.
Even their space menu wasn't typical: Cold pizza and sandwiches, but also pasta Bolognese and Mediterranean lamb.
Before beginning descent, Sembroski was so calm that he was seen in the capsule watching the 1987 Mel Brooks' film 'Spaceballs' on his tablet.
Nearly 600 people have reached space - a scorecard that began 60 years ago and is expected to soon skyrocket as space tourism heats up.
Benji Reed, a SpaceX director, anticipates as many as six private flights a year, sandwiched between astronaut launches for NASA. Four SpaceX flights are already booked to carry paying customers to the space station, accompanied by former NASA astronauts.
The first is targeted for early next year with three businessmen paying $55 million apiece. Russia also plans to take up an actor and film director for filming next month and a Japanese tycoon in December.
Customers interested in quick space trips are turning to Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. The two rode their own rockets to the fringes of space in July to spur ticket sales; their flights lasted 10 to 15 minutes.