Four American space tourists began an incredible zero-gravity journey in a spacecraft on Wednesday SpaceX, where they must spend three days in orbit around the Earth with no professional astronauts aboard, a historic fact given that nothing like it has ever been attempted before.
The Inspiration4 mission was announced on February 1, 2021 and conducted aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX’s second commercial mission.
During the tour, the crew’s sleep, heart rate, blood and cognitive functions will be analyzed to study how novices react in space.
Crew Dragon: Space X’s Ship
O dragon capsule carrying the crew arrived in space in a Falcon 9 rocket, with a height of 70 meters.
The spacecraft has already sent 10 astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on three different missions.
Dragon, 8 meters high and 4 meters wide, was modified for this flight in which it will orbit Earth for three days. A big glass dome It was installed to give four passengers a 360-degree view of space.
the flight plan
The launch took place as scheduled at 8:02 pm local time (00:02 am GMT on Thursday) from NASA Kennedy Space Center, in Florida.
The rocket took off at the scheduled time, 20:02 local (00:02 GMT), from the mythical 39A launch area of ​​the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
A few minutes later, the rocket’s first and second floors parted, leaving the Dragon pod and its passengers alone in the cosmos. The Dragon will orbit Earth for three days at a height higher than the ISS.
You’ll then return to the planet to land off the coast of Florida via a gigantic parachute.
The Inspiration4 Crew
The organization and financing of the mission was led by American billionaire Jared Isaacman, which travels with three people, their guests, through an exclusive selection process.
Hayley Arceneaux, 29, is a nurse who survived childhood cancer.
Chris Sembroski, 42, is a United States Air Force Veteran who now works for the aviation industry.
And geology professor Sian Proctor was a finalist in the training process for NASA astronauts more than a decade ago.
The training
The crew trained for six months, far less than the years of preparation required for professional astronauts.
They learned to withstand the g-force (acceleration) in a centrifuge apparatus and experienced weightlessness.
Although the flight must be fully automated, the team has been trained by Spacex to take control of the ship in an emergency.
.