SpaceX’s first all-civilian crew splashes down in Atlantic Ocean in huge leap for space tourism

THE FOUR newly minted citizen astronauts comprising the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission safely splashed down in the Atlantic on Saturday.

Three-day-long flight by the first all-civil crew to orbit Earth ended with the landing off Florida’s coast.

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The successful launch and return of the mission, the latest in a recent string of rocket-powered expeditions bankrolled by their billionaire passengers, marked another milestone in the fledgling space tourism industry.

“Welcome to the second space age,” Todd “Leif” Ericson, mission director for the Inspiration4 venture, told reporters on a conference call after the crew returned.

SpaceX, the private rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc, provided the spacecraft and managed the splashdown.

Resilience, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule dubbed Resilience parachuted into calm oceans at 7 p.m. ET (2300 GMT) on the last day of its three-day mission.

SpaceX’s YouTube channel showed the splash down just before sunset. It was followed by an automated reentry descent.

After the capsule was lifted from the ocean, the vehicle’s exterior was visible to be severely scorched, the crew members emerged one at a time from the capsule’s side hatch.

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Each of the four stood on the deck for a few moments in front of the capsule to wave and give thumbs-up before being escorted to a medical station on board for checkups at sea.

They were then flown by helicopter back from Cape Canaveral to be reunited with their loved ones.

SEARING REENTRY

The return from orbit followed a plunge through Earth’s atmosphere generating frictional heat that sent temperatures surrounding the outside of the capsule soaring to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 degrees Celsius). Special ventilation systems were used to cool the astronauts in their flight suits.

SpaceX flight control centre in Los Angeles heard a round of applause when the first parachutes were deployed. This reduced the capsule’s speed to around 15 miles an hour (25 kilometers per hour) before splashdown.

As they stepped onto decks of the recovery ship, the astronauts were again cheered.

Hayely Arceneaux (29), a doctor assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Center, Tennessee, was the first to emerge. She is a child bone cancer survivor and became the youngest person to reach Earth orbit via the Inspiration4 mission.

She was followed in rapid succession by geoscientist and former NASA astronaut candidate Sian Proctor, 51, aerospace data engineer and Air Force veteran Chris Sembroski, 42, and finally the crew’s billionaire benefactor and “mission commander” Jared Isaacman, 38.

“That was a heck of a ride for us,” Isaacman, the chief executive of the ecommerce firm Shift4 Payments Inc., radioed inside the capsule shortly after splashdown. “We’re just getting started.”

An undisclosed sum was paid by Time magazine to Musk, a billionaire, for the four Crew Dragon seats.

On Wednesday, the Inspiration4 team took off from Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX reusable Falcon 9 rocket.

HIGHEST ORBIT SINCE APOLLO

Within three hours the crew capsule had reached a cruising orbital altitude of 585 km, or just over 363 miles – higher than the International Space Station or Hubble Space Telescope, and the farthest any human has flown from Earth since NASA’s Apollo moon program ended in 1972.

It was also Musk’s debut flight, and it set the stage for Musk’s space tourism business. This is a leap ahead from competitors that offer rides on rocket ships to wealthy customers who are willing to pay a small fortune and get to experience the thrill of spaceflight.

Musk’s company has been a leader in commercial rocket launches, having successfully launched many cargo payloads and sent astronauts to space for NASA.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc, rival operators, launched their own space tourism services recently, with their founders, billionaires Richard Branson, and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

The suborbital flights took only minutes and were shorter than Inspiration4’s three days in orbit.

Inspiration4 was founded by Isaacman to raise awareness for St. Jude. Arceneaux works there now. Ericson reported that the flight had raised $160million for the cancer center, with $100 million being donated by Isaacman.

Although Proctor and Isaacman are licensed pilots, the Inspiration4 crew did not have any role in flying the spacecraft. It was controlled by ground-based flight teams.

But Ericson insisted the crew had “the same training and the same control and authority that NASA astronauts have” to intervene in the Crew Dragon’s operation in the event of an emergency.

Benji Reed (SpaceX’s human-spaceflight chief), marveled at how few things went wrong during the flight. He mentioned only two problems that were minor and easily solved – a malfunctioning fan within the crew’s bathroom system and a temperature sensor problem on one of the spacecrafts’ engines.

The level of “space adaption syndrome” experienced by the crew – vertigo and motion sickness while acclimating to a microgravity environment – was “pretty much on target with what NASA astronauts do,” Ericson said.

Ericson said that all four of them appeared energetic and relaxed during live video appearances for Earthbound viewers. They performed zero-G somersaults inside the cabin, as well as strumming a guitar.

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