(To donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, feel free to visit the St. Jude page dedicated to the Inspiration4 mission.)
At this point, we’re already a little bit familiar with the situation. We’ve been here before—first with Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity launch last July, then Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch a little over a week after. Now, Elon Musk’s SpaceX joins the commercial spaceflight fray with its own civilian-crewed space launch. This time around, though, they made the stakes and meaningfulness much more significant.
The mission that just launched from Pad 39A in NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, at around 8:02 p.m. EDT is now making historic leaps and bounds for several reasons. Coined the Inspiration4 mission, it is the first space flight in history that was completely manned by civilians. The four members of the mission were trained for the rigors on the body involved with space flight, particularly launch and descent, but the four were otherwise completely new to what would be their momentous achievement. The Crew Dragon was designed to be fully automated for Inspiration4, though the crew were also given some training on manual flight in case of an anomalous event.
The four passengers were: Shift4 Payments CEO and trained pilot Jared Isaacman, who also serves as mission commander and the mission’s primary benefactor; physician’s assistant and cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux, who works in St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the beneficiary of the mission; Lockheed Martin data engineer and United States Air Force (USAF) veteran Chris Sembroski; and geoscientist and Maricopa Community College geology professor Sian Proctor, who is also a science communicator.
The four-person crew sat atop SpaceX’s 70-m (229-ft.) Falcon 9 rocket, and rode inside the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. The four passengers are equipped to stay in space for the three-day mission, and are set to ascend to 575 km (357 mi) above the surface of the Earth—higher than both the Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin missions that came before them, as well as both the international Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. While they brought enough supplies with them to last them a week, according to Isaacman, they are planned to descend back down to Earth after three days, on September 18 or 19 local time, marking the end of the historic spaceflight.
One of Inspiration4’s goals is to raise US$200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Isaacman, who also funded the mission, will donate half of the goal himself.
The Mission Plan
Ten months prior, Isaacman gott himself a seat at SpaceX for a civilian mission launch. Thing is, he had something much grander planned; he actually secured all seats of the Crew Dragon for his flight, for an undisclosed amount of money. He wanted to use his flight to inspire and “[represent] a new era for human spaceflight and exploration,” according to the mission’s website. And thus, the Inspiration4 mission was born.
To do this, Isaacman designated a beneficiary to aid in his desire to raise money and awareness for children’s cancer research. He then decided to designate St. Jude Children’s Hospital, a research hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, in the United States of America, as his beneficiary. The mission now also serves as a call for donations and help to the cancer research institution that helps around 7,800 active patients each year.
In alignment with the mission’s objective, Isaacman designated the four seats in the now all-civilian mission as “pillars” to inspire all peoples. To this extent, he gave the seats the names “Leadership,” “Hope,” “Generosity,” and “Prosperity.” With himself, being a trained pilot, occupying the seat of “Leadership” as mission commander, Isaacman set about gathering his other three crew members.
Our Eyes In the Sky
For “Hope,” Isaacman wanted to grant the seat to an individual who represented hope for humanity. He wanted a frontline worker in the seat—and so he looked into the stories of the people working for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. There, he met 29-year-old Hayley Arceneaux.
Arceneaux, a physician’s assistant, was herself also a cancer survivor. She had been diagnosed with bone cancer at age 10, where she was checked in at St. Jude for treatment. There, she underwent several rounds of chemotherapy. The hospital took notice of her positive disposition, and asked for her help in talking to fellow patients. She became a bastion of hope for her fellow patients, cheering them up despite being a patient herself. Eventually, she would be treated for her cancer, but not without a cost: she needed a prosthetic to replace the bone in one of her legs after her battle with cancer, so she now has a metal rod in its place. However, out of her desire to help other cancer patients, she herself grew up to work as a physician’s assistant, and decided to work in the very hospital that took care of her for so many years. For all this and more, she would be given the seat of “Hope;” the 29-year-old, now also a mission specialist for Inspiration4, is also the youngest-ever American to fly in space, and the first to fly there with a prosthesis.
For the seat of “Generosity,” Isaacman decided to select from one of the bidders of a donation auction for St. Jude, which ended up raising US$13 million. An unnamed individual had actually won the seat after donating, but later found out that they were unable to go. In their stead, they recommended the seat be transferred to their friend Chris Sembroski.
Sembroski also donated to the auction, but was content on simply donating at the time, saying that he would at least “get a neat little patch out of it.” Based on his work experience with Lockheed Martin, and being a USAF veteran who also worked on maintaining Minute III intercontinental ballistic missiles, Sembroski now also serves as mission specialist for Inspiration4.
Isaacman decided to host a contest to select the fourth seat for Inspiration4, assigned to the mission pillar of “Prosperity.” In it, participants were asked to submit videos wherein they would make shops, and promote them in the said videos while calling for donations to St. Jude. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and a community college professor, was chosen as the winner of the contest, which garnered her the fourth seat, representing “Prosperity.”
Proctor submitted a video detailing her shop, called Space2inspire, which combines Afrofuturism space art with poetry. Proctor’s father actually worked for NASA as part of the Apollo missions. She herself also applied to be part of the astronaut training program at NASA back in 2009, but was ultimately passed over. She, however, continued to work with NASA on analog missions (field tests in locations with matching or similar conditions to those expected in extreme environments out in space and on other planets), including the first-ever one at the four-month-long Hawaii Space Exploration and Analog Simulation (HI-SEAS) research facility, Hawaii. Isaacman designated her as Inspiration4’s mission pilot from her experience. Once in orbit, Proctor will follow the footsteps of astronauts Mae Jemison, Stephanie Wilson, and Joan Higginbotham, becoming the fourth African-American woman to go to space.
Together with Isaacman, the three crew members underwent several training sessions before launch. This included training with Dragon simulations, survival training atop Mt. Rainier, and multiple fighter jet flights. The crew were also trained for emergencies in case of anomalous events, like the aforementioned usage of the otherwise-automated Crew Dragon spacecraft. The crew also won’t just take pictures and go sight-seeing while up there; they were trained to—and will—perform science experiments during their space mission, especially given the unique circumstances some of them will have during this mission, which will be unlike any other.
Record-Setters
The totality of the mission will encompass several accomplishments, not only for SpaceX and Inspiration, but also for humanity as a whole. For one, Arceneaux will be the first human in space with a prosthetic, meaning any data obtained on how her body will react to the environments present during spaceflight may help expand the definition of what it means to be an astronaut in the future. And as mentioned before, the success of this all-civilian space mission will provide a glimpse of a future where commercial space flight—especially for tourism—may no longer need accompanying trained astronauts, instead relying on spacecraft automation. Another particular mission objective has the four crew members monitoring their blood glucose levels during the mission, in an effort to better understand our body’s response to space; the results from this study will inform diabetes research, as well as research into a support system for astronauts and civilian space travelers who depend on insulin.
The recently-launched Inspiration4 mission also marks the 128th flight of the Falcon 9 rocket. The rocket is also partially reusable. As the rocket boosters attached to the main body detach once they consume all their fuel during takeoff to reduce weight, SpaceX has designed a way to return these rockets safely back to Earth, landing in floating landing platforms called “drone ships” that are sent to locations in the sea where the booster is predicted to land. In the Inspiration4 launch, the rocket boosters landed in the drone ship “Just Read the Instructions,” marking the company’s 92nd successful booster landing.
The Inspiration4 crew is set to return on September 18 or 19 local time, through an automated descent facilitated by the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
(A documentary series about the Inspiration4 mission, titled Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, is currently available for online streaming. Alternatively, you can view more photos from the Inspiration4 launch from the mission’s Flickr page.)
References
- Gohd, C. (2021, September 13). Sian Proctor to take Afrofuturism art, science and a lifelong passion for exploration to space on private Inspiration4 mission. Space.com. https://www.space.com/sian-proctor-pilot-inspiration4-spacex-mission
- Gohd, C. (2021, September 14). Inspiration4’s Hayley Arceneaux will be youngest American to reach space and 1st spaceflyer with a prosthesis. Space.com. https://www.space.com/hayley-arceneaux-spacex-inspiration4-first-spaceflyer-prosthesis
- Howell, E. (2021, September 14). From Space Camp to space, Inspiration4’s Chris Sembroski readies for trip of a lifetime. Space.com. https://www.space.com/chris-sembroski-inspiration4-spacex-mission
- Inspiration4. (n.d.). Inspiration4. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from https://inspiration4.com
- Thompson, A. (2021, September 16). SpaceX launches four civilians into orbit on historic Inspiration4 flight. Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/spacex-launches-inspiration4-civilian-orbital-mission
