![]() Mr Isaacman-described in a review of “Countdown” in the Guardian, a British newspaper, as “that rarest of beasts, a genuinely personable billionaire”-is listed in the Inspiration4 manifest as “commander and benefactor”. Another measure of the company’s pre-eminence is that Resilience is one of three Dragons in orbit at the moment her sister ship Endeavour has been docked at the ISS since April, and an unnamed cargo-carrying version of the capsule arrived there at the end of August. It is a measure of SpaceX’s pioneering success in developing reusable hardware that its customers have no qualms about launching their satellites-or even themselves-on a refurbished booster or in a refurbished capsule (even the Pentagon, which was cagey for a while, is now happy with the idea of a previously used launcher). ![]() The first stage of the mission’s Falcon 9-which landed back on Just Read The Instructions, one of SpaceX’s drone ships, nine minutes after take off-was making its third flight. The capsule that Inspiration4 is using, called Resilience, was used for a trip to the ISS last year. The resemblance goes all the way down to the flight hardware. Fulfilling that contract was what got SpaceX into human spaceflight tourism is a sideline it is exploring now that that main business is up and running. The trajectory on which it arced out over and above the Atlantic was pretty much indistinguishable from that of the flights SpaceX provides as part of its contract with NASA to take astronauts to and from the ISS. Like almost all such launches it was also routine. The launch, like all big rocket launches, was spectacular. Their three-day progress will be visible in clear night skies around the world, for those who know where to look. On September 19th, after more than 40 orbits-40 sunrises, 40 sunsets-they will re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in the Atlantic. As Netflix will delightedly demonstrate, they will be able to look out at space and down at Earth through a transparent cupola specially fitted to their Dragon2 to enhance the experience. Within hours their Dragon2 spacecraft had raised their orbital altitude to around 575km, some 150km higher than that of the International Space Station (ISS). Rather than plopping straight back down to Earth a few minutes after crossing a largely arbitrary line in the upper atmosphere which defines “space”, as Sir Richard and Mr Bezos did, Mr Isaacman and his three companions have gone all the way to orbit, propelled by a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher. It is being undertaken not to show off his own wares but to enjoy the possibilities afforded by someone else’s-specifically those of SpaceX, a company founded and run by Elon Musk-while at the same time raising money for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Very rich entrepreneurs going into space has been something of a trend in recent months, with Richard Branson being flown to 85km in a rocketplane built by Virgin Galactic, a company he founded, and Jeff Bezos reaching 107km in a capsule launched by New Shepard, a rocket built by his company, Blue Origin. The Inspiration4 mission was conceived and paid for by Jared Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments.
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