Inspiration4 is in Space: the first orbital mission with a crew of non-professional astronauts travels 575 kilometers above our heads, 175 higher than the International Space Station (and it is no coincidence), where the man did not arrive from the Sts 125 mission of the Space Shuttle, in 2009. In orbit, the commander and financier of the trip, Jared Isaacman, along with Hayley Arceneaux, Chris Sembroski e Sian Proctor (all 4 civilians with no affiliation with government agencies or bodies), will begin a series of experiments for the next 3 days, with the aim of studying the behavior of the human body in microgravity. Then they will return home by ditching off Florida.
SpaceX Inspiration4
Elon Musk overtakes Bezos and throws 4 people into Space. Alone and for 3 days
by Carlotta Scozzari
“Whose profits?“, the skeptic might object, not so fascinated by space adventures; why get excited about an initiative that seems like yet another habit of a millionaire with extraterrestrial scams?
To answer, it would be appropriate to go back to the beginning, to the departure, at 2:02 Italian time today, September 16th: Inspiration4’s journey began at that moment, when SpaceX’s reusable Falcon9 rocket, with the Dragon capsule named Resilience at its head, detached itself from Kennedy Space Center’s ramp 39A. It is the same complex from which Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11 took off, in 1969, for lead humanity to walk on a surface other than that of the earth. For the first time, a small step beyond a boundary deemed insurmountable.
The correspondence does not seem forced, because although it cannot aspire to affect history as the first moon landing did, it would be ungenerous to underestimate Inspiration4 in terms of primates, symbolic value and promises of something just beginning. Indeed, it would be a mistake, even at a time when legitimate criticisms are multiplying, raised by the environmental impact of the growing number of launches and by the opportunity of their spending. In the specific case, 200 million dollars, that is the price of the 4 tickets that it is rumored (without official confirmation) Isaacman has paid to grab an entire SpaceX-branded flight.
Thirty-eight years old, director of the online payment company Shift4Payment and founder of the largest private airline and qualified in the training of military pilots, Draken International, Isaacman organized the mission with the specific intent to finance the St. Jude hospital in Memphis, which specializes in pediatric oncology. So, not only has it personally donated 100 million, made sure that through Inspiration4, many others donated money to the hospital.
To do this, he auctioned the 3 seats on board excluding his own and created one perfect convergence between marketing and philanthropy, a project capable of demonstrating the accessibility to Space by ordinary people (although now handsomely sponsored by others, that is, by him) and at the same time exploiting, without beating about the bush, the communicative appeal of the Space.
Result? For starters, more than $ 31 million raised with one online campaign to which it is still possible to contribute. Secondly, the distribution, on Netflix, of the first near-real-time documentary on an extraterrestrial mission. Produced by Time Magazine in collaboration with the Known studio and signed by Jason Hehrir, the director of The Last Dance, the film, in 5 episodes, was the prelude to the direct dedicated to the launch, the first live coverage of Netflix.
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The most significant effect, however, was Arceneaux’s involvement on board the Resilience: suffering from osteosarcoma at the age of 10, she was hospitalized and healed at St. Jude, where she now works as a medical assistant with patients affected by leukemia or lymphoma. Arceneaux is the first person to fly into space with a prosthesis, an artificial left femur that replaces bone lost due to the disease. Not a secondary fact, given the intent of the space agencies, primarily the European one, ESA, of extend the recruitment of future astronauts to people with disabilities physical.
In the next 72 hours, taking advantage of tools available on the market such as Apple Watch and Butterfly iQ + (for ultrasound scans), Arceneaux will coordinate most of the medical experiments that Isaacman, Sembroski, the winner of the charity auction, and Proctor, teacher and aspiring astronaut will undergo (he was a finalist in the 2009 NASA selection).
Proctor was selected for the best project of an online store that exploited the Ship4Payment software. And it is no coincidence that his social communication for months has been focusing on collective benefits of the new space economy and on the potential relationships of space activities with the humanities, from poetry to art. Because these are the other crucial aspects of Inspiration4.
In response to those who wonder if the recent businesses of space billionaire are nothing but a waste of money, the economic, scientific and cultural repercussions of a mission detached from the government initiative are the vanguard of what Space will become in the coming decades: not (only) the most exclusive destination of a billionaire tourism, but the basis on which to build the infrastructures of our imminent daily life. It will take growing awareness, of course, to protect the Earth and prevent business and conflicting extra-atmospheric interests do not increase the problems rather than solving them.
However, already at this moment, while its 4 protagonists float weightlessly 575 kilometers above our heads, Inspiration4 reiterates that also thanks to tourism, the orbits around the Earth will be exploited for commercial purposes, will allow access to extra-atmospheric resources, or to relocate industrial supply chains, positively impacting on pollution and on the optimization of terrestrial resources, on the availability of food and on the accessibility to information. Basically they are these are the real goals of Musk, Bezos and Branson.
Already today, the reusable technologies used by SpaceX, Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic promise to train future professional astronauts, to test science and technology of laboratories, institutions and universities who until yesterday could not afford the long and therefore expensive process to have their own experiment on the International Space Station. This represents more than anything else the mission that took off from the Apollo ramp itself: the promise of one Space as a new collective opportunity. A sustainable, inclusive space from which, if we are able to respond to its challenges, we will all benefit.
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