The quartet of newly minted citizen astronauts comprising the Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) Inspiration4 mission safely splashed down in the Atlantic off Florida’s coast on Saturday, completing a three-day flight of the first all-civilian crew ever sent into Earth orbit.
The successful launch and return of the mission marked another milestone in the fledgling industry of commercial astro-tourism, 60 years after the dawn of human spaceflight.
“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.
Photo: Space Exploration Technologies Corp via AP
SpaceX, the private rocketry company founded by Elon Musk, supplied the spacecraft, launched it, controlled its flight and handled the splashdown recovery operation.
The three-day mission ended as the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Resilience, parachuted into calm seas at about 11pm GMT, shortly before sunset, following an automated re-entry descent, as shown during a live SpaceX Web cast on its YouTube channel.
Within an hour, the four smiling crew members were seen emerging one by one from the capsule’s side hatch, after the vehicle, visibly scorched on its exterior, was hoisted from the ocean to the deck of a SpaceX recovery vessel.
Each of the four stood on the deck for a few moments in front of the capsule to wave and give the thumbs-up before being escorted to a medical station on board for checkups at sea.
Afterward they were flown by helicopter back to Cape Canaveral for reunions with loved ones.
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 1,900°C. The astronauts’ flight suits, fitted to special ventilation systems, were designed to keep them cool if the cabin heated up.
Applause was heard from the SpaceX flight control center in suburban Los Angeles as the first parachutes were seen deploying, slowing the capsule’s descent to about 25kph before splashdown, with another round of cheers as the craft hit the water.
The astronauts were cheered again as they stepped onto the deck of the recovery ship.
First out was Hayely Arceneaux, 29, a physician assistant at St Jude Children’s Research Center in Tennessee, a childhood bone cancer survivor herself who became the youngest person ever to reach Earth orbit on 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 the crew’s billionaire benefactor and “mission commander” Jared Isaacman, 38.
“That was a heck of a ride for us,” Isaacman, chief executive officer of the e-commerce firm Shift4 Payments Inc, radioed from inside the capsule moments after splashdown. “We’re just getting started.”
The Inspiration4 team blasted off on Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
Within three hours the crew capsule had reached a cruising orbital altitude of 585km, the farthest any human has flown from Earth since NASA’s Apollo moon program ended in 1972.
Benji Reed, senior director of human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, marveled at how little went wrong during the flight, citing just two problems he described as minor and easily resolved: a malfunctioning fan in the crew’s toilet system and a faulty temperature sensor on one of the spacecraft’s 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.
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