To date, each mission to low Earth orbit has included no less than one skilled, government-employed astronaut. That’s set to vary this week as an all-civilian crew prepares to blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It’s been fairly the 12 months for the burgeoning area tourism trade. In July, each Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, with their respective billionaire founders on board, launched crewed autos to the sting of area. Now it’s SpaceX’s flip to do the identical, however, like nearly every little thing the Elon Musk-led firm does, its try is significantly bolder.

For the Inspiration4 mission, SpaceX will launch 4 civilians—Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor, and Chris Sembroski—to orbit, and they’ll circle Earth repeatedly for 3 days earlier than splashing down off the coast of Florida. By distinction, the Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin flights had been suborbital, lasting for just a few minutes and assembly the minimal necessities for coming into area.

If all goes in response to plan, Inspiration4 would be the first absolutely business crewed flight to succeed in low Earth orbit. SpaceX is providing a completely new sort of journey to area, although a form that can solely be accessible to the extremely wealthy. Isaacman, the billionaire founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, “plunked down an unspecified but presumably exorbitant sum” in order that he and three “specially selected travel mates” can attain low Earth orbit aboard the Resilience Crew Dragon, as Reuters reports. Spaceflight Now says SpaceX will finally cost $50 million per seat for future non-public missions.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was rolled out to Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on Saturday, September 11, and the crew carried out a costume rehearsal the subsequent day. Blastoff is scheduled for Wednesday, September 15, with a five-hour launch window starting at 8:02 p.m. EDT. There’s at present a 70% chance of favorable climate situations. Should the launch be scrubbed, the backup window begins once more on Thursday on the similar time. This will likely be simply the fourth launch of a crewed Crew Dragon.

Resilience is not going to dock with the International Space Station, permitting for the removing of the Crew Dragon docking port. In its place is the Dragon Cupola—a glass dome that can present an beautiful view of Earth. SpaceX will ship the spacecraft to an altitude of 357 miles (575 km), the place it can journey at 22 instances the velocity of sound and orbit Earth as soon as each 90 minutes. For reference, the International Space Station is roughly 264 miles (425 km) above Earth, whereas the crewed spacecraft operated by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin by no means received any larger than 66 miles (106 km) above the bottom.

Isaacman, 38, will likely be joined by Hayley Arceneaux, 29, a doctor’s assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and a childhood bone cancer survivor; Sian Proctor, 51, a geoscientist and licensed pilot; and Chris Sembroski, 41, a U.S. Air Force veteran and aerospace information engineer. Arceneaux would be the first person to go to space with a prosthesis, in addition to the youngest American to orbit Earth. Both Proctor and Sembroski gained a worldwide contest for his or her seats, throughout which period over $110 million was raised for the youngsters’s hospital. The 4 crewmembers are supposed to symbolize the 4 mission pillars: management, hope, generosity, and prosperity. It ought to be identified that not one of the 4 crew members might want to do any piloting, because the mission is totally autonomous.

While in area, the crew will carry out “carefully selected research experiments on human health and performance” with “potential applications for human health on Earth and during future spaceflights,” according to the Inspiration4 web site. With technical assist from Weill Cornell Medicine and the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at Baylor College of Medicine, the crew will observe ECG exercise, motion, sleep, coronary heart charges, and blood oxygen, amongst different well being measures. They’ll additionally run blood checks, carry out stability and notion checks, and use an ultrasound gadget to scan their organs.

Inspiration4 is a rigorously curated and completely packaged product designed to deflect any criticism as a for-profit enterprise enterprise. And that’s positive, as we are able to all see via the pretense. But despite the fact that the billionaire-led area tourism period appears to have begun in earnest, us common people realize it’ll be a really very long time—if ever—earlier than we get an opportunity to succeed in area.

More: Richard Branson’s journey to area didn’t go as deliberate.