Agence France-PresseFeb 02, 2021 14:32:56 IST
SpaceX announced Monday that it aims to launch its first all-terrestrial mission into Earth orbit, led by a billionaire technical expert who is expected to be one of the spots on board. take away a craft. Entrepreneur Jared Isaacman is to be joined by three new astronauts for a multi-day trip to space, including one lucky photo winner. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event: a trip into outer space on the first all-civil spaceflight,” according to a website dedicated to the mission.
SpaceX, the company that started Elon Musk, said Isaacman is “offering the three sets next door … to individuals from the crowd that will be announced in the coming weeks.”
The launch of the Dragon spacecraft is being targeted for “no earlier than the fourth quarter of this year,” the company said. One chair will go to a staff member from St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which treats childhood cancers and pediatric diseases. The latter will be drawn from those who enter the lottery and are encouraged to donate to the hospital.
The third will be selected by a panel of judges from entrepreneurs who use an e-commerce tool from the Isaacman company, Shift4 Payments.
The three crews will receive “SpaceX commercial training astronauts on the Falcon 9 launch vehicle and the Dragon spacecraft,” as well as orbital mechanics and pressure testing, including working in miniature gravity -no zero, the statement said.
SpaceX says that during the multi-day mission, the astronauts orbit the Earth every 90 minutes.
After the mission, the spacecraft will return into the atmosphere for water coming off the coast of Florida.
Shift4 Fund Chief Jared Isaacman orders the all-civilian mission to go into orbit. Image: SpaceX
In mid-November 2020, four astronauts were brought into orbit by the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and boarded the International Space Station.
The Dragon capsule just a week ago had become the first NASA-tested spacecraft since the Space Shuttle went missing nearly 40 years ago. The launch vehicle is the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that can be used.
At the end of his missions, the Dragon Crew uses a parachute and then showers down in water, just as it did in Apollo’s time.
NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing after shutting down the checkered Space Shuttle program in 2011, which failed in its primary goals of making space travel accessible and safe.
The group will have spent more than $ 8 billion on the Commercial Crew program by 2024, in the hope that the private sector can pay attention to NASA’s needs in “Earth’s low orbit” and so it is liberated to focus on missions returning to the Moon and then on to Mars.
In addition to the first commercial mission, SpaceX plans to launch two more crew aircraft for NASA in 2021, including one in the spring, and four cargo refueling missions over the next 15 months.