Billionaire among all-civilian SpaceX crew set to blast off into space

Los Angeles — Yet another billionaire entrepreneur is set to ride into space this week, strapped inside the capsule of a SpaceX rocketship as part of an astro-tourist team poised to make history as the first all-civilian crew launched into Earth orbit.

Jared Isaacman, the American founder and CEO of e-commerce firm Shift4 Payments, will lead three fellow space flight novices on a three-day trip from blast-off at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to splashdown in the Atlantic.

The 38-year-old tech mogul has plunked down an unspecified but presumably exorbitant sum for fellow billionaire and SpaceX owner Elon Musk to fly Isaacman and three specially selected travel mates into orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

The crew vehicle, dubbed Resilience, was set for lift-off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center atop one of Musk’s reusable Falcon 9 rockets, with a five-hour targeted launch window that opens at 2am on Wednesday.

Forecasts on Sunday predicted a 70% chance of favourable weather conditions for launch, organisers said, on a flight directed entirely from the ground.

A successful flight could spawn a new era of commercial space tourism, with several firms vying for wealthy customers to pay a small fortune to experience the exhilaration of supersonic travel, weightlessness and the visual spectacle of space.

Setting acceptable levels of consumer risk in the inherently dangerous endeavour of rocket travel is also key, and raises a pointed question.

“Do you have to be both rich and brave to get on these flights right now?” Sridhar Tayur, a professor of operations management and new business models at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, asked on Friday.

The so-called Inspiration4 mission was conceived by Isaacman mainly to raise awareness and support for one of his favourite causes, St Jude Children's Research Hospital, a leading paediatric cancer centre.

He has pledged $100m personally to the institute.

SpaceX is easily the most well-established player in the burgeoning constellation of commercial rocket ventures, having already launched numerous cargo payloads and astronauts to the International Space Station for Nasa.

Rival companies Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin both recently celebrated their debut astrotourism missions with their respective founding executives, billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, each going along for the ride.

Earth orbit

But those two high-profile flights were suborbital in scale, sending their crews of citizen astronauts to space and back in a matter of minutes.

The SpaceX flight is designed to carry its four passengers where no all-civilian crew has gone before, into Earth orbit.

There, they will circle the globe once every 90 minutes at more than 27,360kph, or about 22 times the speed of sound. The target altitude is 575km beyond the orbits of the International Space Station or even the Hubble Space Telescope.

Like Blue Origin, the 20-story-tall SpaceX launch vehicle and crew capsule will take off vertically from a launch pad on a flight directed entirely from the ground.

Branson’s suborbital rocket aircraft, by contrast, had two highly trained pilots at the controls as it carried its four rear-seat passengers 81km high.

The Inspiration4 crew will have no part to play in operating their spacecraft, despite some largely honorary titles, though two, Isaacman and geoscientist Sian Proctor, are licensed pilots.

Online contest

Isaacman, who is rated to fly commercial and military jets, has assumed the role of mission “commander”, while Proctor, 51, once a Nasa astronaut candidate herself, has been designated as the mission “pilot”.

She was selected to join the team through an online contest run by Shift4 Payments.

Rounding out the crew are “chief medical officer” Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a bone cancer survivor turned St Jude physicians’ assistant, and mission “specialist” Chris Sembroski, 42, a US Air Force veteran and aerospace data engineer.

Sembroski won a seat in a sweepstake that drew 72,000 applicants and has raised more than $100m in St Jude donations.

The four crewmates have spent five months making rigorous preparations, including altitude fitness, centrifuge (G-force), microgravity and simulator training, emergency drills, classroom work and medical exams.

SpaceX and the crew planned a full dress-rehearsal of launch-day activities at the Cape on Sunday night, to be followed by a final “static” test firing of the rocket’s engines, organisers said.

Inspiration4 officials say that the mission is more than a joyride.

Once in orbit, the crew will perform medical experiments with “potential applications for human health on Earth and during future space flights” the group said.

Appearing in a promotional clip for a Netflix documentary series on the mission, Arceneaux said a big part of her motivation was to kindle hope in her cancer patients.

“I’m getting to show them what life can look like after cancer,” she said.

Reuters