In news- SpaceX’s ‘Inspiration4’, world’s first all-civilian, non-governmental spaceflight, is on track for launch on September 15.
About the mission-
- The Crew Dragon spacecraft is set to be launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida in the US.
- It will take a group of four private citizens into space for three days.
- All four seats on the spacecraft have been purchased by US billionaire Jared Isaacman, founder of the fintech company Shift4 Payments.
- This is a part of an effort to raise millions for the Tennessee-based St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a paediatric treatment and research facility that focuses on children’s catastrophic diseases.
- Joining Isaacman on the journey to space is Haley Arceneaux, a childhood bone cancer survivor and physician’s assistant at the hospital.
- The two others who will be on the spacecraft are Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski who will be part of the mission after winning a global contest.
- The mission involves circling the Earth for three days, and then splashing down into the Atlantic Ocean.
- Inspiration4 will orbit the Earth at 575km, higher than the International Space Station (408km) and the Hubble space telescope (547km).
- This will be the farthest distance travelled by a crewed mission since 2009, when astronauts last went to repair the Hubble.
- As Inspiration4 is not going to the ISS, the docking port has been removed and has been replaced with a dome window, inspired by the Cupola, a module on the ISS used to make observations about earth.
The mission will use the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule. This will be the second flight of the spacecraft, which first flew as part of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico on 2 May 2021.
Source: Indian Express
