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SpaceX’s first private flight has been put into orbit, with two contest winners, a medical worker and their rich sponsors on board. This is the most ambitious leap of space tourism to date.
The launch on Wednesday night was the first time a spacecraft has orbited the Earth without a full amateur crew and no professional astronauts.
“Hit it, SpaceX!” Jared Isaacman, the billionaire leader of the flight, urged before taking off.
The two men and two women of the Dragon capsule hope to orbit the Earth from an unusually high orbit—160 kilometers (100 miles) higher than the International Space Station—before splashing off the coast of Florida this weekend.
This is the first time that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has participated in the space travel dollar competition.
Isaacman is the third billionaire to launch this summer, after Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos conducted a short space flight in July. At only 38 years old, Isaacman made a fortune from a payment processing company he founded when he was a teenager.
Joining Isaacman on the trip called Inspiration4 was 29-year-old Hayley Arceneaux, a child bone cancer survivor who worked as a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, where she was treated. Isaacman has pledged to the hospital to spend US$100 million out of his pocket, and is seeking another US$100 million in donations.
Arceneaux became the youngest American in space and the first person to install a prosthesis in space, with a titanium rod on her left leg.
Also participating in the sweepstakes were Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old data engineer in Everett, Washington, and Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old educator at a community college in Tempe, Arizona.
NASA, which once opposed space tourism, is now a supporter.
“Low Earth orbit now makes it easier for more people to experience the wonders of space,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote on Twitter, who was a member of Congress when he boarded the space shuttle decades ago.
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