Space travel: tourists fly through space for three days – economy

2021 is the year of space tourism: two months after the flights of billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk’s space company Space-X has now also launched a flight exclusively with private individuals for the first time. The company boss is not there, but another billionaire: Jared Isaacman, founder and head of the listed payment service provider Shift4Payments in Pennsylvania. The 38-year-old, who can also fly traffic and military jets, took off into space on Wednesday evening, local time, with a doctor’s assistant, a geoscientist and an aeronautical engineer from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a Crew Dragon capsule. “Today you really inspire the world,” reported the Space-X control center. “Good Trip!”

This time it’s not about experiencing weightlessness for just a few minutes at an altitude of around 100 kilometers. The crew orbits the earth for three days at about 27,000 kilometers per hour, at an altitude of about 585 kilometers and thus further away than the International Space Station ISS – this is also a height record for Space-X. “The views are spectacular,” said Isaacman after the start. Space fans can find the position of the spaceship live on the Internet on the website of Space-X follow.

The flight is not only intended for pleasure: the luggage weighing around 165 kilograms also includes scientific equipment for experiments in weightlessness. The crew also wants to collect biomedical data and make them available for research purposes. This should include, for example, data on exercise and sleep, blood oxygen saturation, the organs as well as cabin noise and light intensity. However, there should also be enough free time: A dome window, which is built into the capsule instead of a docking adapter, allows a panoramic view of the earth and space. “A glass dome is probably where you feel most like you’re in space,” Musk tweeted enthusiastically. After the mission, the capsule will land in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida.

Isaacman also wants to raise at least $ 200 million for the St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, with this flight, for which he also took numerous objects with him to later auction. Including Non Fungible Token (NFT) – digital art with a certificate of authenticity -, clocks, toys and a ukulele. In addition, a US brewery wants to produce a special beer from 30 kilos of hops that fly with it. Isaacman himself donated $ 100 million, and he picked 29-year-old St. Jude medical assistant Hayley Arceneaux to be the first to travel – and then raffled off the other two spots through fundraising campaigns.

So finally the 51-year-old geoscientist and pilot Sian Proctor and the 42-year-old aeronautical engineer Chris Sembroski joined the team. The four of them spent half a year preparing for the flight at Space-X and in Cape Canaveral, including centrifuge training, zero-G flights, simulations, medical tests and altitude training. For example, the team spent several days at an altitude of around 3,000 meters in the Mount Rainier area near Seattle, and some climbed the almost 4,400-meter-high summit. The capsule is controlled from a control center, if necessary Isaacman and Proctor can intervene as experienced pilots. Isaacman announced the flight in February. “I’ve been a space fan since kindergarten,” the 38-year-old was quoted as saying.

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“This flight marks the transition in manned space travel from public to private,” said space historian John Logsdon Washington Post. “It’s like someone renting a self-steering yacht and sailing into space with it.” How much Isaacman pays for the mission is not publicly known. With this flight, Space-X also wants to prove that the average person who is physically fit can complete a flight into space without years of preparation. The US company Axiom wants four private flights with Space-X for ISS offer, premiere is next year with a science mission.