Technology
What time is the SpaceX Inspiration4 launch today?
ELON MUSK is set to make history this evening if his SpaceX firm successfully launches the first all civilian space flight.
Here’s a round up of the timings and how to watch so you don’t miss a thing.
APInspiration4 is almost ready for take off[/caption]
SpaceXChris Sembroski (top left), Hayley Arceneaux (top right), Jared Isaacman (bottom left) and Sian Proctor (bottom right) are the four civilians going on the SpaceX flight[/caption]
What time is the SpaceX Inspiration 4 launch?
The current plan for the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission is to launch the astronauts sometime after 8:02pm EDT on Wednesday.
That means sometime after 1:02am BST on Thursday for SpaceX fans in the UK.
There will a launch window of around five hours and the flight could be delayed if the weather conditions aren’t perfect.
US civilians Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski will blast off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The flight is expected to last three to four days from launch to splashdown and the civilian astronauts will spend most of that time orbiting Earth.
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They’ll be inside SpaceX’s capsule Crew Dragon, which has been modified to provide great views of Earth.
The capsule will be launched into orbit via a Falcon 9 rocket.
Billionaire Isaacman will be commanding the mission.
How to watch SpaceX Inspiration4 flight
Netflix will be showing a special 90 minute programme of the flight this evening.
It starts at 7pm EDT (11pm GMT).
You can watch live on via Netflix’s YouTube channel.
Who is going on the SpaceX civilian Inspiration4 mission?
Jared Isaacman is a 38-year-old billionaire and founder and CEO of Shift4Shop Payments.
He has paid an unspecified but presumably decadent sum for the trip to SpaceX, which is owned by fellow billionaire Elon Musk.
Dubbed Inspiration4, the mission is designed primarily to raise awareness and support for one of Isaacman’s favorite causes, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a leading pediatric cancer center.
He has pledged $100million personally to the institute.
As mission “commander,” Isaacman designated St. Jude physician’s assistant Haley Arceneaux, 29, as his first crewmate.
Hayley is a bone cancer survivor and onetime patient at the Tennessee-based hospital.
Chris Sembroski, a Seattle-area aerospace industry employee and U.S. Air Force veteran, was later selected.
Sembroski’s friend actually won this seat after taking part in a fundraising campaign for St. Jude’s.
Sian Proctor, 51, a geoscience professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, was chosen separately through an online contest run by Shift4 Payments.
Sian is also an entrepreneur and was once a Nasa astronaut candidate.
All four have undergone six months of extensive training modelled after the curriculum Nasa astronauts use to prepare for SpaceX missions.
“When this mission is complete, people are going to look at it and say this was the first time that everyday people could go to space,” Isaacman previously told reporters.
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