SpaceX's Inspiration4 Mission is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT

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SpaceX's Inspiration4 Mission is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT
SpaceX has been busy been preparing for its Inspiration 4 launch which is a multimillion-dollar fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Hospital and — like a lot of recent flights to space these days — an effort to convince those watching from the ground that space won't always be exclusive to government officials and the ultra-wealthy.

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The mission will send four private citizens up above the Earth, where they will float for three days before falling back down and splashing into the ocean. Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, booked the Crew Dragon capsule last year and picked three normal folks to ride with him. It will be the first completely private mission to orbit.

The Inspiration 4 crew is slated to launch atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, buckled inside the same Crew Dragon capsule that nearly a year ago sent a four-person crew of government astronauts to the International Space Station and back. This mission's destination is about 80 miles higher than the ISS. In orbit, they will view Earth through two windows and a new glass dome that was added to the top of the capsule, where Crew Dragon's ISS docking door was. The crew will reenter the atmosphere after three days, depending on the weather around Florida, and splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX recovery teams will likely meet up with the capsule, hoist it onto a ship, extract the crew, and bring them ashore
Isaacman, a trained pilot and the founder of a payment processing company, is the commander of the flight. He has said he wanted to arrange a diverse crew of passengers who were not billionaires. He paid for all four seats on Crew Dragon and dropped the first $100 million of a $200 million fundraiser for St. Jude, a nonprofit research facility and hospital that provides free care to children with cancer. Isaacman reserved two of the seats for St. Jude — one would go to the winner of a fundraising campaign and the other would go to Arceneaux, who works at St. Jude as a physician assistant in Memphis, Tennessee, and will serve as the mission's medical officer. She is a childhood cancer survivor who is helping the mission raise money and awareness for the hospital.
Isaacman's other partners are Sian Proctor who is the mission's pilot, is a geosciences professor at South Mountain Community College in Arizona, and a science communicator who has dreamed of going to space since she was a child. Proctor's father worked for NASA at a tracking station in Guam during the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on the moon. Proctor applied to be a NASA astronaut for the class of 2009 but was ultimately not selected. She is an Afrofuturism space artist whose inspirational video and art propelled her into her seat to space. She thought her dreams of going to space would never come true until she got the call from Inspiration4. And Chris Sembroski who is an Air Force veteran working for aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. He is a data engineer and a former Space Camp counselor and will be a mission specialist for the flight. Sembroski won the seat after making a donation to St. Jude through a fundraising campaign organized as part of Inspiration4.

When announced in February, Inspiration4 was billed as a fundraiser for St. Jude's. The mission has the goal of raising $100 million, plus an additional $100 million donated by Isaacman. Raffle ticket sales were expected to contribute a major share of that $100 million but fell short of initial expectations.

The Inspiration4 website states that it has raised $29.2 million toward that $100 million goal as of early Sept. 10. The mission announced Sept. 9 that it will carry a diverse payload of items, ranging from memorabilia to non-fungible tokens, a type of digital collectible, it will later auction to raise additional funds.

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