The billionaire takes an engineer, an entrepreneur, a professor and a doctor into the cosmos (but he remains on the ground)
The moment was awaited and dreamed of. A space mission featuring only ordinary citizens has now become a reality by materializing another of Elon Musk’s promises. With his own capsula Crew Dragon, already used in a previous trip, two women and two men took off last night from ramp 39 A at Cape Canaveral. For three days they will fly around the Earth 540 kilometers high, even higher than the ISS station by a hundred kilometers. To organize the new step of a space increasingly on a human scale, he thought a Musk’s fellow billionaire Jared Isaacman (38) enriched with e-commerce especially for shops and restaurants through the Shift4 Payments platform he conceived after dropping out of school to devote himself to the passion of software. A lover of flight, he also transformed this other inclination into a business creating a second company supplying training jets also to the military.
So, he imagined a space mission renting for $ 200 million Musk’s Space X capsule with a wish: all the exclusively civilian crew members had to be inspirers baptizing the expedition Inspiration4. He chose three travel companions starting with Sian Proctor (51 anni) which crowned the desire to fly into orbit after being eliminated from the selection of NASA astronauts in 2009. Sian, born in Guam where her father was a technician at the lunar flight listening station, accumulated other merits that made her a well-known character. With a background in environmental science and geology insegna al South Mountain Community College in Arizona but she is above all active as a scientific communicator among young people, telling the wonders of the oceans, Antarctica and the cosmos also on Discovery Channel. Sion was chosen with an online recruitment from among 200 candidates but was already known to Isaacman for marketing his poems and artistic images with the Shift4 platform.
Beside sits Chris Sembroski (41) Air Force veteran and engineer in the aerospace industry. Its task is the management of some biomedical scientific experiments. But Chris got the flight by helping Isaacman organize a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, of which he is a supporter. The campaign, which started in February, quickly raised $ 113 million for research from 72,000 people. And to strengthen the initiative, it offered a seat on the Dragon a Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old girl who symbolizes the fight against disease. When he was 10 he fell ill with bone cancer. Treated at St. Jude, she won the terrible disease, then studied medicine and is now a medical assistant in the same hospital. “A great example for all kids,” says Isaacman.
The first four actors of the civil space in the three days beyond the atmosphere will be able to admire the blue Earth and the black sky quilted with stars from a glass dome obtained at the top of the capsule by replacing the system usually necessary for coupling to the ISS station. At the end of the historic experience they will land in front of the Florida beaches. Thus begins another era of space.
September 15, 2021 (change September 15, 2021 | 21:58)
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