Inputs by Aarya Krishnan
Florida, Sep 19: SpaceX launched the first ever all civilian crew into space on 15 September 2021. The mission was named Inspiration4 and onboard were four civilians – billionaire e-commerce executive Jared Isaacman, geoscientist Sian Proctor, physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, and aerospace data engineer Chris Sembroski. After staying at an orbital altitude of 575 km over Earth for three days, the crew splashed down with a water landing in the Atlantic Ocean off Florida coast.
The mission was launched on the Falcon9 rocket of SpaceX in the interior of a Dragon spacecraft from the Kennedy Space Centre of NASA in Florida in the United States. Inspiration4 orbited Earth at a height of 575 km, which is higher than the International Space Station (408 km) and the Hubble Space telescope (547 km). Inspiration4 is also the first to travel the furthest distance covered by any crewed mission since Servicing Mission-4 of the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009.
38-year-old Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments had bought four seats for an undisclosed amount on the Crew Dragon spacecraft. With over 6000 hours of piloting various aircrafts, Isaacman was the commander of Inspiration4. The aircraft used for their ascent is named Falcon9. It is a reusable, two-stage rocket for the reliable and safe transport of people and payloads into the orbit of Earth and beyond. Falcon9 is also the world’s first orbital-class reusable rocket. The Dragon spacecraft is the first private spacecraft that can take humans to the space station. It is currently capable of carrying up to seven travelers to and from the orbit of Earth.
About SpaceX: Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (popularly known as SpaceX) was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with an ambitious goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable colonization of Mars. It holds multiple records like being the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit (Falcon1 in 2008), first private company to successfully launch, orbit, and recover a spacecraft (Dragon in 2010), first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station (Dragon in 2012), first vertical take-off and vertical propulsive landing for an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2015), first reuse of an orbital rocket (Falcon 9 in 2017), and first private company to send astronauts to orbit and to the International Space Station (SpaceX Crew Dragon Demo-2 in 2020). Reusability allows SpaceX to re-use many expensive rocket parts, which in turn reduces the overall cost of space access.
