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Between two playful M & Ms snacks, Inspiration4’s all-civilian team took a break from their science mission to chat with child patients at a children’s hospital in Memphis.
The three-day Earth orbit mission, which launched Wednesday, September 15, aims to raise $ 200 million and a lot of publicity for St. Jude Children’s Hospital, where the adorable press conference took place. place.
Among the four crew members of the private SpaceX mission is the 29-year-old former hospital cancer patient Haley Arceneaux, who is the first astronaut to fly with a prosthesis. Arceneaux is now Physician Assistant for St. Jude. She floated upside down for most of the brief press conference, available on YouTube.
“I just want you all to know that we are doing this for you,” Arceneaux said. “We think about you so much, I wanted to tell you that I was a little girl undergoing cancer treatment, like many of you. If I can do it, you can do it, and so I am. proud each of you. “
Video: Inspiration4 crew talks to patients in St. Jude from space
Live Updates: SpaceX’s Inspiration4 Fully Civilian Private Orbital Mission
Crew commander and billionaire Jared Isaacman, 38, paid $ 200 million for the opportunity to fly the crew higher in Earth orbit than anyone since the Apollo era. Responding to a question from patient Tyler about why the mission is taking place, Isaacman said he believes there is still a lot to do in space.
“There are a lot [space], and we know so little about it, ”he said. “There can be some really interesting answers to questions we’ve all been asking for a long time, so we have to do it. But we also have to pay attention to some of the real responsibilities that we also have on Earth. This is why St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is such an important part of our mission. “
Related: Inspiration4: SpaceX’s historic private space flight in photos
Sian Proctor, 51, is a longtime analog astronaut who is now in space for real, becoming the first black female spacecraft pilot to orbit. A patient, Eva, asked him and the rest of the crew for the sleeping bags they were using in space.
“If you’ve been camping before, we had pretty much the same kind of sleeping bags,” she explained. “Last night was the first time we slept here in space. It was really cool because we were in our sleeping bags on our chairs, but we were floating on the chairs and we had a belt. safety around our sleeping bag, so we don’t fly off while we sleep. “
Lockheed Martin employee and former space camp advisor Chris Sembroski held M & Ms for the rest of the crew and distributed them between questions, which led to some fun moments as the astronauts scrambled to position themselves to catch the floating candies. Arceneaux even interrupted one of his questions for a moment to dive headfirst for an M&M floating right next to his upside down head.
The crew appeared to get the most out of the small SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft during their mission and took a moment to show patients the incredible view outside the flying dome window instead of a mooring mechanism. (Inspiration4 will not dock with the International Space Station, which Crew Dragons have historically been used for.)
Although the crew are not trained astronauts, Arceneaux paid tribute to the six months of work that the quartet devoted to the mission of knowing each other, through experiences like survival in water and a flight in zero gravity. Besides the experience of the crew, she noted, “It was a lot of learning, a lot of studying PowerPoints, reading documents, and then we got to do some really cool hands-on stuff.”
The crew also asked about why they weren’t falling into space, their favorite space food (Proctor was planning to have pizza for the second night in a row) and if there were still any astronauts on the moon (Proctor said soon, referring to the NASA Artemis program.)
The crew is expected to land late Saturday (September 18) or early Sunday (September 19).
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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