Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket left shortly after 2 am Italian time, 8 pm local time, carrying, for the first time, a crew of only 4 civilians without any professional astronaut. a billionaire e-commerce entrepreneur (Jared Isaacman) and three other private citizens, in all two men and two women.
The rocket took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a three-day mission in Earth orbit at a height of 575 kilometers, well beyond the International Space Station. A huge ball of fire lit up the sky as the rocket’s nine engines began moving away from Earth.
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The second stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket separated as expected about 12 minutes after takeoff, leaving the Dragon capsule with the four space tourists on board alone in the cosmos. The first stage, after having wrested the rocket from Earth’s gravity, was safely recovered on a barge at sea, in order to be reused.
The two men and two women of the Dragon capsule are trying to spend three days circling the planet from an unusually high orbit – 100 miles (160 kilometers) higher than the International Space Station – before landing off the coast of Florida. weekend. It is SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s first entry into the space tourism billionaire competition. Isaacman is the third billionaire to fly into space, following brief space travel by Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos in July. At just 38, Isaacman made a fortune with a digital payment processing company he started as a teenager.