Strangers until March, the four spent six months training and preparing for potential emergencies during the flight - but there was no need to step in, officials said after their return. “Best ride of my life!” Proctor tweeted a few hours after splashdown. Jude physician assistant who was treated at the Memphis, Tennessee hospital nearly two decades ago for bone cancer, and contest winners Chris Sembroski, 42, a data engineer in Everett, Washington, and Sian Proctor, 51, a community college educator, scientist and artist from Tempe, Arizona. Joining him on the flight were Arceneaux, 29, a St. Late Saturday, Musk tweeted he was donating $50 million, putting them over the top.įor the last seat, Isaacman held a competition for clients of his Allentown, Pennsylvania payment-processing business, Shift4 Payments. Donating $100 million himself, he held a lottery for one of the four seats. Isaacman, 38, an entrepreneur and accomplished pilot, aimed to raise $200 million for St. This time, NASA was little more than an encouraging bystander, its only tie being the Kennedy launch pad once used for the Apollo moonshots and shuttle crews, but now leased by SpaceX. Their families were waiting near the scene of Wednesday night’s launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. When the capsule’s hatch was opened on the recovery ship, health care worker Hayley Arceneaux was the first one out, flashing a big smile and thumbs up. Within a few minutes, a pair of SpaceX boats pulled up alongside the bobbing capsule. SpaceX’s two previous crew splashdowns - carrying astronauts for NASA - were in the Gulf of Mexico. The four streaked back through the atmosphere early Saturday evening, the first space travelers to end their flight in the Atlantic since Apollo 9 in 1969. Surpassing the International Space Station by 100 miles (160 kilometers), the passengers savored views of Earth through a big bubble-shaped window added to the top of the capsule. SpaceX’s fully automated Dragon capsule reached an unusually high altitude of 363 miles (585 kilometers) after Wednesday night’s liftoff. “It was a heck of a ride for us … just getting started,” replied trip sponsor Jared Isaacman, referring to the growing number of private flights on the horizon. “Your mission has shown the world that space is for all of us,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed. The billionaire who paid undisclosed millions for the trip and his three guests wanted to show that ordinary people could blast into orbit by themselves, and SpaceX founder Elon Musk took them on as the company’s first rocket-riding tourists. DOWNLOAD FILM THE BILLIONAIRE PROFESSIONALThe all-amateur crew was the first to circle the world without a professional astronaut. Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the ocean just before sunset, not far from where their chartered flight began three days earlier. (AP) - Four space tourists safely ended their trailblazing trip to orbit Saturday with a splashdown in the Atlantic off the Florida coast.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |