ELON MUSK made history last night when his SpaceX firm successfully launched the first all civilian space flight.
US civilians Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski blasted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and will be in orbit for a few days.
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How long is SpaceX journey and when will Elon Musk’s astronauts return?
The SpaceX Inspiration4 mission launched the astronauts at around 8:02pm EDT on Wednesday.
That was around 1am BST on Thursday for SpaceX fans in the UK.
The Inspiration4 astronauts are aiming to be on the mission for three days before landing back on Earth.
The civilian astronauts will spend most of that time orbiting Earth.
Then, they should land at a site in the Atlantic Ocean on September 19.
They’re inside SpaceX’s capsule Crew Dragon, which has been modified to provide great views of Earth.
The capsule was launched into orbit via a Falcon 9 rocket.
Billionaire Isaacman is commanding the mission.
Who is on the SpaceX civilian Inspiration4 mission?
Jared Isaacman is a 38-year-old billionaire and founder and CEO of Shift4Shop Payments.
He has paid an unspecified but presumably decadent sum for the trip to SpaceX, which is owned by fellow billionaire Elon Musk.
Dubbed Inspiration4, the mission is designed primarily to raise awareness and support for one of Isaacman’s favorite causes, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a leading pediatric cancer center.
He has pledged $100million personally to the institute.
As mission “commander,” Isaacman designated St. Jude physician’s assistant Haley Arceneaux, 29, as his first crewmate.
Hayley is a bone cancer survivor and onetime patient at the Tennessee-based hospital.
Chris Sembroski, a Seattle-area aerospace industry employee and U.S. Air Force veteran, was later selected.
Sembroski’s friend actually won this seat after taking part in a fundraising campaign for St. Jude’s.
Sian Proctor, 51, a geoscience professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, was chosen separately through an online contest run by Shift4 Payments.
Sian is also an entrepreneur and was once a Nasa astronaut candidate.
All four have undergone six months of extensive training modelled after the curriculum Nasa astronauts use to prepare for SpaceX missions.
“When this mission is complete, people are going to look at it and say this was the first time that everyday people could go to space,” Isaacman previously told reporters.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
