The launch of the Falcon 9 reusable rocket carrying the mission will take place within a five-hour launch window that is set to begin at 8:02 p.m. EDT. Currently, the launch conditions are 70 percent favorable, according to the Inspiration4 website, with a backup window arranged for the following day should the rocket not be able to launch. The launch will take place from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center.
The general public can watch the launch as it is live-streamed on the official SpaceX YouTube channel. They can also follow the day’s events on SpaceX’s Twitter account.
During the three-day orbit, the crew—Jared Isaacman, Sian Proctor, Hayley Arceneaux, and Christopher Sembroski—will circle the Earth several times at a distance of around 370 miles and at around 22 times the speed of sound. It will be the first fully commercial crewed mission to reach a low-Earth orbit.
The team will make the historic space journey aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience (Dragon C207). The craft journeyed to the International Space Station (ISS) on November 17 with NASA crew members and became the first Crew Dragon and the first Commercial Crew Program craft to perform an operational docking at the station. The Dragon C207 has been under refurbishment since it arrived back on earth on May 2, 2021.
The crew completed rehearsals for the launch in Sunday, as documented on the SpaceX Twitter account.
Previous commercial missions by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, both of which launched in July of this year, reached the edge of space. The SpaceX project will go one step further.
Unlike those two projects, which carried billionaire company founders Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, respectively, SpaceX founder Elon Musk will not make the trip. There will still be a billionaire onboard, however.
Mission commander Issacman, 38, is the CEO and founder of Shift4 payments who paid an unspecified sum of money to allow himself and his three crewmates to make the space journey.
Two of the seats purchased by Issacman were given to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, who selected childhood bone cancer survivor and physician assistant Arceneaux, 29, for the trip. Arceneaux will become the youngest American to reach space and the first astronaut with a prosthesis.
The remaining seats go to geosciences professor and science communicator Proctor, 51, and U.S. Air Force veteran and Lockheed Martin aerospace industry data engineer Sembroski, 41.
Samborski was gifted the seat by a friend who won a raffle for a place on the mission, which raised $13 million for the hospital.
The mission will be fully automated, but the team will help perform a series of experiments in zero gravity conditions. Ensuring art is serviced by the voyage as well as science, Sembroski intends to perform a song from space, while Proctor will give an art lesson.
