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It’s not often that a space mission gets its own reality TV-style documentary on Netflix, but that’s exactly what a mission called Inspiration4 got this month. We’ve already had a bit of controversy this year as two well-known billionaires (Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos) took short rocket trips to the edge of space. The Inspiration4 mission was quite different, mainly because it was an orbital flight. The previous two launches were top-down business giving everyone on board less than 10 minutes of weightlessness, this time the four-person crew was in space for three days, making a full orbit of the land every 90 minutes, and they landed safely. the Florida coast last Sunday.
The entire theft was paid for by US billionaire Jared Isaacman who used it to raise funds for a children’s cancer research hospital: St. Judes. He donated $ 100 million to the hospital and by raffling one of the seats on the flight, he grossed an additional $ 113 million. There is another link to St. Judes Hospital as one of the team, Hayley Arceneaux, is a childhood cancer survivor who was treated there and now works in St. Judes in as a nurse. She will also mark other firsts on the flight as she will be the youngest American to fly in space and the first person in space with a prosthesis.
The other crew members are Christopher Sembroski, who is a friend of the raffle winner who was unable to make the trip, and Dr. Sian Proctor, geologist and space artist. All four had to follow a training regimen which, while not as rigorous as that of a professional astronaut, was still quite difficult and involved sessions in a centrifuge and Zero-g training on an airplane dubbed the Vomit Comet. .
It was the first time that space tourists had made an orbital journey since 2009, when the founder of Cirque du Soleil visited the International Space Station (ISS). The Inspiration4 crew is the first crew of all private citizens flying a private spacecraft orbiting the earth. All the equipment for the mission was built by SpaceX and had previously been used to transport NASA astronauts to the ISS.
Limerick Astronomy Club email limerickastronomyclub @ gmail.com
