Sep 17, 2021
On Wednesday, September 15 at 8:02 p.m. EDT, 00:02 UTC on September 16, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 successfully launched the Inspiration4 mission – the world’s first all-civilian human spaceflight to orbit – from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Approximately three days after liftoff, Dragon and the crew of Inspiration4 will splash down at one of several possible landing sites off the Florida coast. Follow Dragon’s journey in the tracker above as the Inspiration4 crew orbits Earth approximately every 90 minutes.
Inspiration4 is commanded by Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments and an accomplished pilot and adventurer. Joining him are Medical Officer Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital® and pediatric cancer survivor; Mission Specialist Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace data engineer; and Mission Pilot Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist, entrepreneur, and trained pilot.
Mission Objectives
by Component (Antenna, Bracket, Shield, Housing and Propulsion), Satellite Mass (Nano and microsatellite, small satellite, medium and large satellite), Application and Region
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Dragon is traveling to an apogee of approximately 575 kilometers — flying farther than any human spaceflight since the Hubble missions. Dragon’s new cupola observation dome is the largest contiguous space window ever flown. Designed, tested, and qualified for flight in six months, it replaced the mechanism used on Dragon’s previous flight to autonomously dock to the International Space Station. The three-layer observation dome was put through an extensive qualification process, including thermal, vibration, structural environments, and life-cycle to verify capability.