The ‘Inspiration4’ team will fly this morning aboard a SpaceX ship to circle the Earth for three days
A quartet of citizens will tonight become the first to compose an all-civilian crew in orbit. Aboard a SpaceX ship, the ‘Inspiration4’ mission will depart from NASA’s Kennedy Center in Florida (USA) to circle the Earth for three days. They are not professional astronauts, but they all have an extraordinary story:
JARED ISAACMAN, 38: Billionaire founder of an e-commerce company
If the mission is possible, it is thanks to your money. According to ‘Time’ magazine, this entrepreneur paid a sum that has not been revealed, but which may amount to 200 million dollars, for the four seats aboard the Crew Dragon capsule.
Isaacman transformed the business he started as a teenager in the basement of the family home into one of America’s leading financial transaction services.
Shift4 Payments.
An aviation enthusiast, he flew in the Black Diamond civilian aerobatic squadron and co-founded a private air force of military training fighter jets called Draken International, but his fortune has sprung from e-commerce. He is considered the ‘commander’ of the mission, although it is more of an honorary title.
SIAN PROCTOR, 51, teacher on the verge of becoming an astronaut
This professor of geosciences at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix (USA) with a doctorate in science education, is passionate about space. It is in her blood, because her father worked in Guam, where she was born, for a NASA tracking station during the Apollo lunar missions.
A licensed pilot with the Arizona Civil Air Patrol, he has completed four simulated space activities projects, including a four-month NASA-funded ‘mission to Mars’ to study food strategies for long-duration spaceflight.
Proctor was a 2009 finalist in NASA’s astronaut candidate program and is now set to become the fourth African-American woman to fly in space.
HAYLEY ARCENEAUX, 29, cancer survivor
Arceneaux is a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Center in Memphis, Tennessee, the leading pediatric cancer center where she herself was once a patient. The young woman, who lost part of her left thigh and knee to cancer at the age of 10, will become the first person with a prosthesis to go into space. She is motivated to participate in the space flight to show her young patients “what life after cancer can be like”
St. Jude, where Arceneaux works with children with leukemia and lymphoma, is the main beneficiary of the ‘Inspiration4’ project, which Isaacman conceived primarily as a fundraising and promotional effort for the institute.
CHRIS SEMBROSKI, 42, engineer and former Iraq veteran
Samborski, a data engineer for aerospace giant Lockheed Martin in Everett, Washington, spent some of his free time in his youth launching high-powered model rockets and simulated space shuttle missions. He joined the US Air Force as an electromechanical technician and was sent to Iraq. He helped maintain a fleet of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles before leaving active service in 2007. Both Proctor and Sembroski won a worldwide contest for their seats that attracted 72,000 applicants and raised more than $110 million for the Children’s Hospital.
The four crew members represent the pillars of the mission: leadership (Isaacman), hope (Arceneaux), generosity (Proctor), and prosperity (Sembroski). The mission is completely autonomous and no one will have to pilot the ship.
Editorial Team
