In what's a historic step for private space travel, SpaceX launched its first all-civilian crew on a three-day journey around the Earth in one of the space company's Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft. The spacecraft successfully launched on a veteran Falcon 9 rocket(the B1062) into orbit at 00:02 UTC from NASA's Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida.
The flight marks the fourth crewed mission for SpaceX, but the first to carry private citizens--the Inspiration4 crew is a team of four private citizens--as opposed to professionally trained astronauts. The Inspiration4 mission is part of a fundraising effort to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Billionaire and founder of Shift4 Payments, Jared Isaacman, purchased the flight on one of SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft, donating two of the seats to St. Jude and awarding the fourth seat as the top prize in a "shark tank-like" competition to one entrepreneur to raise money for the charity.
"I can't express enough how appreciative we are of this amazing opportunity, we know that the four of us are about to have an experience and only about 600 or so had before us," Isaacman told reporters Tuesday. "And we're very focused on making sure that we give back every bit of that time that we get on orbit for the people in the causes that matter most to us."
Joining Isaacman on the flight are medical officer Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor and physician's assistant at St. Jude; pilot Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and science communicator; and mission specialist Chris Sembroski, a data engineer.
Approximately three days after liftoff, Dragon and the Inspiration4 crew will splash down at one of several possible landing sites off the Florida coast.
WATCH the Inspiration4 liftoff highlight.