Space Exploration
Inspiration4 - The First All-Civilian Mission to Space
Published: 12 September 2021
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SpaceX successfully launched the first all-civilian crew into orbit where they’ll spend 3 days aboard a Crew Dragon capsule.
The launch of the first all-civilian mission to orbit is an ambitious test for a burgeoning space industry's futuristic dream of sending many more ordinary people to space in the next few years. Companies and nations envision millions of people living and working in space without having to become professional, government-backed astronauts. Those hopes are riding on SpaceX's next crewed mission, called Inspiration4. Previous launches have taken billionaires to suborbital space or sent space tourists to the International Space Station alongside professional astronauts, but this mission is the first with a crew made up entirely of amateur astronauts.

Inspiration4 is effectively a proof of concept for the idea that an all-civilian mission aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft — and ostensibly that all-amateur spaceflight — can work. Four crewmembers — Jared Isaacman, Sian Proctor, Chris Sembroski and Hayley Arceneaux — will launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sept. 15, 2021.

They will orbit the Earth for about three days, flying higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope before coming in for a splashdown off the Florida coast. During their mission, the crew will live in close quarters, stare down at Earth and at the stars, perform science experiments and keep an eye on how their spacecraft is performing while mission controllers monitor it from the ground.

SpaceX wants space travel one day to be akin to air travel so that anyone who wants to can fly to orbit or far-off parts of space. "We'd like to see aircraft like — airline, like — operations from a human spaceflight perspective, and so this chance to have our first commercial all-civilian flight is awesome," SpaceX director of human spaceflight Benji Reed said. Flying to space isn't anything like flying on a commercial airliner, at least not yet.
