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Updated at 9:15 p.m. EST, with comments from the post-splashdown briefing.
KIHEI, Hawaii – SpaceX’s first private crewed mission ended with the Crew Dragon spacecraft landing off the coast of Florida on September 18.
The Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft splashed off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Fla., At 7:06 p.m. EST. The water landing took place 50 minutes after the spacecraft began its desorbit combustion.
“Inspiration4, on behalf of SpaceX, welcome home to planet Earth,” said Kris Young, SpaceX’s director of space operations, from SpaceX mission control moments after the landing. “Your mission has shown that space is for all of us and that ordinary people can have an extraordinary impact on the world around them. “
“Thank you very much, SpaceX. It was a hell of a ride for us, ”said Jared Isaacman, the Commanding Officer. “Things are just beginning. “
The water landing closed the Inspiration4 mission 71 hours after its launch on September 15 from the Kennedy Space Center. Isaacman, a billionaire, paid for the theft, intending to use it as a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Hayley Arceneaux, medical assistant and former patient of St. Jude, accompanied Isaacman on the mission; Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and artist who won a competition affiliated with Isaacman’s online payment company, Shift4 Payments; and Chris Sembroski, selected in a raffle to raise funds for St. Jude.
In a 10-minute live video session on September 17, the crew appeared to be enjoying their time in orbit. They discussed activities ranging from biomedical research to taking pictures in a dome installed in the nose of the spacecraft.
On a call with reporters about an hour after the landing, SpaceX and Inspiration4 officials said the mission went very well. “It was a very clean mission from start to finish,” said Benji Reed, senior director of human space flight programs at SpaceX. He described a problem with a ventilator in the spacecraft’s waste management system, but that the crew were “happy and healthy”. A temperature sensor in a Draco thruster malfunctioned, but he said the sensor and the thruster itself were redundant.
“The crew were able to complete the long duration mission without any issues,” said Todd Ericson, Inspiration4 mission director. “There are always a little hiccup or two along the way, but these were handled incredibly by the team at SpaceX.”
Inspiration4 has raised nearly $ 30 million for St. Jude since launch, including about $ 60 million according to the project’s website. However, it’s still a long way from the $ 100 million target when Isaacman and SpaceX announced the mission in February. Inspiration4 said in a Sept. 17 statement that it hopes to raise $ 200 million, including $ 100 million already donated by Isaacman, by February 2022.
Inspiration4 was SpaceX’s fourth crewed flight, but the first not part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The landing is the third for a crewed Crew Dragon spacecraft; The Crew-2 spacecraft that launched in April is still docked at the International Space Station and is expected to return in November.
The next Crew Dragon mission for NASA, Crew-3, is scheduled to launch on October 31 with astronauts for NASA and the European Space Agency. The next private Crew Dragon mission is the Ax-1 mission for Axiom Space, which will launch no earlier than January 2022 and will spend a week on the ISS.
Reed said in the appeal that there was a growing demand for Crew Dragon commercial flights. “The number of people contacting us through our sales and marketing portals has actually increased dramatically,” he said, predicting that SpaceX could take on five or six crewed missions per year between NASA and business customers. “If the demand is there, then we’ll want to see what we can do to continue to develop it. “
“This mission will be seen as the first mission in the opening of the second space age, where space travel has become much more accessible to average men and women around the world,” Ericson said.
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