4 amateurs set for SpaceX orbital flight; all you need to know about Inspiration4 mission

Apart from looking down at Earth through a large dome, the quartet will conduct experiments in space “to increase humanity’s knowledge on the impact of spaceflight on the human body." They are likely to collect data on ECG activity, heart rate, sleep, blood oxygen saturation, cabin noise and light intensity.

The mission will be commanded by Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, who has booked the flight for an undisclosed sum.

"When this mission is complete, people are going to look at it and say, 'It was the first time everyday people could go to space'," Isaacman told the BBC.

With the mission, Inspiration4 wishes to raise $200 million for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

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The four will fly into space in SpaceX-manufactured Dragon atop a Falcon-9 rocket. The vehicle, called Resilience, will be launched from the historic Florida's Kennedy Space Centre, which has been the launchpad of  Apollo 11’s lunar mission. The vehicle is capable of carrying up to seven people and is the first private spacecraft to take humans to a space station. The spacecraft is fitted with a glass dome in place of the mechanism the vehicle uses to dock with the ISS. The crew will alight or splash down on the Atlantic Ocean.

Apart from Isaacman, the spacecraft will fly Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee; Dr Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old geoscientist and science communicator; and Chris Sembroski, a 42-year-old US Air Force veteran and engineer at aerospace company Lockheed Martin.

The mission follows Richard Branson’s flight on his Virgin Galactic craft on July 11 and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s trip on the New Shepard vehicle on July 20.

Inspiration4 will go fully into the orbit, unlike Branson and Bezos who only went above the atmosphere. Their space trips were completed in a few minutes, while Inspiration4 will spend three days in space.

The space flights are also different in terms of speed. The Resilience capsule will move at an orbital velocity to circle the Earth, balancing momentum and force of gravity. This means, it will move at a speed of more than 27,000 kmph. The quartet will thus complete a full rotation of the Earth every 90 minutes. The Branson and Bezos flights could only move at a fraction of that speed.

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