Last Wednesday night, CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla — SpaceX’s first private flight blasted off with two contest winners, the most ambitious leap yet in space tourism. It was the first time a rocket speckled toward orbit with an all-amateur crew.
A billionaire e-commerce executive and three less-wealthy private citizens chosen to join from Florida for three days. It’s the first chartered passenger flight for Elon Musk’s space company.
SpaceX webcast of the launch leading by Jared Isaacman, 38, and his crewmates – Sian Proctor, 51, Proctor is SpaceX’s first-ever black female spacecraft pilot and the fourth black female astronaut ever to go into space. Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a childhood cancer survivor who works at a research hospital, has become the youngest American in space as she joins Isaacman on the flight and Chris Sembroski, 42.
The Dragon capsule’s two men and two women are looking to spend three days circling the world from an unusually high orbit 100 miles higher than the International Space Station.
This recycled Falcon rocket soared from the same Kennedy Space Center pad. They were also used by the company’s three previous astronaut flights for NASA. But this time, the Dragon capsule aimed for an altitude of 357 miles, just beyond the Hubble Space Telescope.
However, the capsule is automated but the four Dragon riders spent six months training for the flight to cope up with any kind of emergency. That training contained within separator and fighter jet flights, launch and return practice in SpaceX’s capsule trainer, and an exhausting trek up to Washington’s Mount Rainier in the snow.
Four hours before the voyages the passengers waving and blowing kisses to their families and company employees and taking the elevator up they posed for pictures and bumped gloved fists.
According to SpaceX, the capsule had reached its final cruising orbital altitude of just over 363 miles Within three hours. Which is the furthest that any human has flown from Earth since NASA’s Apollo moon program ended in 1972.
At that height, the Crew Dragon was circling the globe once every 90 minutes at a speed of some 17,000 miles per hour.
SpaceX’s next private trip will be next year. where a retired NASA astronaut escorting three wealthy businessmen to the space station for a weeklong visit. The Russians are launching an actress, film director, and a Japanese tycoon to the space station in the next few months.
