Inspiration4: Space for more
From liftoff last week to splashdown three days later, Spacex’s first fully commercial crewed mission was a startto-finish success for the company aiming to fly many, many more private customers to Earth orbit and beyond.
The mission known as Inspiration4, made possible by payments industry billionaire Jared Isaacman, is a highlight in a wider conversation about space tourism. Dozens of companies are aiming to pull off similar adventures for their customers, even if the price tags are lower and the spacecraft entirely different.
For an undisclosed sum – easily in the tens of millions of dollars and possibly as high as $200 million based on what NASA pays for Crew Dragon seats – Spacex took Isaacman, health care worker Hayley Arceneaux, professor and science communicator Sian Proctor, and engineer Chris Sembroski on a three-day flight full of spectacular visuals and science experiments. The flight began at Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A and ended just a few dozen miles away with splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean.
Isaacman covered every last cent, including tax implications for his crew. “The door is open,” he said, to a future rife with professional and non-professional astronauts exploring the cosmos.
But at least one thing is clear today: even with Inspiration4’s success, a fullfledged commercial spaceflight industry is still far off. As seen throughout history, the early days of exploring the next frontier belong to the ultra-wealthy and well-connected – the Vasco da Gamas, Ferdinand Magellans and Christopher Columbuses of the 21st century.
Unpacking Inspiration4
Billionaires bankrolling spaceflights is familiar territory for 2021. It was just a couple months ago Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos flew to space – or, in the case of Branson, the “edge of space” – with companies they founded and continue to support financially.
Countless factors made Inspiration4 different from those other flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, respectively, but one stands out the most: the Falcon 9 rocket vaulted Crew Dragon on a high-energy orbit not on the edge of space, but well beyond even that of the International Space Station.
Traveling a whopping 17,500 mph, the capsule achieved a peak altitude of 366 miles during the three-day mission. Humans hadn’t traveled that far from Earth since space shuttle astronauts were tasked with Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions in the 1990s and early 2000s.
“I count (Branson and Bezos) as spaceflights and I count them as astronauts,” said Jonathan Mcdowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who also maintains a detailed database of launches. “But technically in every respect, an orbital flight is much more challenging.”
From reaching the higher orbit to multi-day life support for four humans to dealing with a high-energy atmospheric re-entry, Crew Dragon had its fair share of responsibilities. But those also help explain the cost of the mission, which is still accessible only to a select few.
Billionaires reaching for space began 20 years ago with Dennis Tito, who paid roughly $20 million ($31 million in 2021 dollars) for a flight to the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He is often said to be the first “space tourist” to fully fund his own trip.
“They really paved the way for this idea that some rich people are prepared to pay a ginormous amount of money for a stay of a few days in orbit around Earth,” Mcdowell said.