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The four civilian pilots who will enter orbit this week as part of the privately run Inspiration4 mission were seated inside a SpaceX crew capsule on Sunday night in Florida during a dress rehearsal for launch day. .
Hours later, after the crew members exited the launch pad, SpaceX tested the Falcon 9 rocket to launch the Inspiration4 mission.
Back-to-back milestones came after SpaceX rolled out the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule to launch Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Saturday night. SpaceX erected the 65-meter-tall launcher vertically onto the launch pedestal on Sunday morning, setting the stage for the crew’s dress rehearsal later today.
The Inspiration4 mission is poised to become the first manned space flight to reach orbit with a crew made up entirely of private citizens. Every crew to fly in Earth orbit to date has been led by a government-employed astronaut.
In July, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin – founded by billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos – launched fully private crews into space on their own commercial spacecraft. But these suborbital missions only reached the edge of space, giving passengers a few minutes of microgravity and providing brief views of Earth at an altitude of over 50 miles (80 kilometers).
Commissioned by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who paid SpaceX for the three-day four-seat flight, the Inspiration4 mission is the centerpiece of a charity project designed, in part, to raise $ 200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a non-profit institution dedicated to the treatment of children with cancer and other pediatric illnesses.
Isaacman is a civilian pilot experienced in flying high performance fighter jets. But SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule is fully automated, with mission control ground crews also able to send commands to the spacecraft.
Crew members inside the ship’s pressurized compartment, the size of a large SUV, can step in to manually control a desorbit burn, parachute deployment, or take other action if something goes wrong.
Isaacman, 38, will be joined on the mission by Sian Proctor, 51, a private pilot and science educator with a master’s degree in geology, Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old assistant physician in St. Jude, and Chris Sembroski, an Engineer from 42-year-old data from the Seattle area.
Proctor and Sembroski obtained their places through a competition and a lottery. Arceneaux, a survivor of childhood cancer, was named to the crew to represent “hope”.
While Isaacman hasn’t revealed exactly how much he paid SpaceX for the Inspiration4 mission, each Crew Dragon seat sells for over $ 50 million, according to a report by the NASA Inspector General.
Inspiration4 crew members trained in a simulator at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., Flew in fighter jets, and flew in a zero-gravity trainer for a taste of what they will experience in orbit.
They arrived at Kennedy Space Center last week for the final week of launch preparations.
On Sunday night, Isaacman and his teammates took part in a “dry dress rehearsal” with SpaceX, practicing every step they take on launch day.
The four crew members departed from SpaceX’s Hangar X facility at the Kennedy Space Center at around 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) and boarded Tesla Model X cars to pad 39A, where SpaceX set up a room where private crews like Inspiration4 will be putting on their spacesuits.
The Inspiration4 crew donned their flight suits, performed air pressure integrity checks, and then completed the trip to the launch pad, where they took an elevator to the pad tower. . Once at 265 feet, Isaacman and his teammates walked through the access arm leading to the Crew Dragon’s hatch.
SpaceX personnel helped the crew board the capsule and take their seats, then the private astronauts exited the spacecraft to complete the dress rehearsal around 10 p.m. EDT.
With the crew members safely out of the launch pad danger zone, SpaceX then loaded kerosene and liquid oxygen into the two-stage rocket for a test firing of the Falcon’s Merlin main engines. 9.
After a simulated countdown, the rocket’s first stage engines fired for several seconds at 2:30 a.m. EDT (06:30 GMT) on Monday, producing 1.7 million pounds of thrust as the holding clamps held the Falcon 9 firmly in place. on the ground.
SpaceX drained the rocket’s propellants after the static fire, while engineers looked at the data to verify all systems are ready for launch.
Assuming everything looks good, SpaceX should give a “power” for the launch during a final readiness review.
SpaceX will launch Inspiration4 crew members at an altitude of approximately 357 miles (575 kilometers), above the altitude of the International Space Station. That’s more than anyone has flown in over a decade since the Space Shuttle serviced the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Crew Dragon capsule will circle the Earth dozens of times before re-entering the atmosphere for a parachute-assisted ditching off the coast of Florida three days after take-off.
This will only be the fourth flight of a Crew Dragon capsule with people on board, after three launches that transported NASA astronauts to the space station. The capsule assigned to the Inspiration4 mission is Crew Dragon Resilience, which made its first flight in space earlier this year.
The Inspiration4 mission will not dock at the station, but will orbit solo. SpaceX replaced the Crew Dragon capsule docking port with a glass dome designed to give crew members a panoramic view of Earth and space as the ship roams the planet at over 17,000 mph.
A launch weather forecast released Monday by the US Space Force’s 45th Weather Squadron predicts an 80% chance of favorable conditions at the Kennedy Space Center for Inspiration4 takeoff on Wednesday evening.
The launch window opens at 8:02 p.m. EDT Wednesday (0002 GMT Thursday) and closes at 1:13 EDT (0513 GMT). SpaceX has four instant launch opportunities available during the window, each separated by approximately 103 minutes, the time it takes for teams to repackage the Falcon 9’s densified propellants for a new launch attempt.
There is a moderate risk that overland winds will be out of range, forecasters said on Monday. Officials will monitor this parameter to ensure that winds do not bring the Crew Dragon capsule back to earth in the event of an emergency evacuation maneuver using the craft’s powerful SuperDraco thrusters before or during takeoff.
Managers will also monitor wind and sea conditions in the Atlantic Ocean along the Falcon 9 rocket flight corridor northeast of the Kennedy Space Center. The rocket will fly roughly parallel to the east coast of the United States to transport the Crew Dragon capsule to an orbit tilted 51.6 degrees from the equator.
The spacecraft could crash along the flight path if a rocket failure triggers an in-flight abandonment, and one of SpaceX’s drones deployed to a downstream recovery area for the booster landing. reusable first stage of Falcon 9.
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