• After three days orbiting Earth, the crew of the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission – the world’s first civilian mission to orbit – safely splashed down off the coast of Florida, completing their first multi-day low Earth orbit mission.

• The three-day mission ended as the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Resilience, parachuted into calm seas. 

• The Inspiration4 team had blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral atop one of SpaceX’s two-stage reusable Falcon 9 rockets.

• SpaceX, the private rocketry company founded by Tesla Inc electric automaker CEO Elon Musk, supplied the spacecraft, launched it, controlled its flight and handled the splashdown recovery operation.

• This was the third time that Elon Musk’s company has taken humans to space and back, after the return of two NASA missions, one August in 2020 and another in May this year. Both were bringing astronauts back from a stay at the ISS.

• The successful launch and return of the mission, the latest in a recent string of rocket-powered expeditions bankrolled by their billionaire passengers, marked another milestone in the fledgling industry of commercial astro-tourism, 60 years after the dawn of human spaceflight.

• Two rival operators, Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc and Blue Origin, inaugurated their own space tourism services in recent months, with their respective founding executives, billionaires Richard Branson and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, each going along for the ride. Those suborbital flights, lasting a matter of minutes, were short hops compared with Inspiration4’s three days in orbit.

The crew of Inspiration4

• Inspiration4 was the brainchild of Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, to raise awareness and bolster support for his St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital situated in Memphis, Tennessee.

He was joined by:

• Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and pediatric cancer survivor.

• Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace data engineer.

• Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist, entrepreneur, and trained pilot.

• The Inspiration4 crew had no part to play in flying the spacecraft, which was controlled by ground-based flight teams and onboard guidance systems. 

• Within three hours the crew capsule had reached a cruising orbital altitude of 585 km — higher than the International Space Station or Hubble Space Telescope, and the farthest any human has flown from Earth since NASA’s Apollo moon program ended in 1972.

• It marked the debut flight of Musk’s new space tourism business and a leap ahead of competitors likewise offering rides on rocket ships to well-heeled customers willing to pay a small fortune to experience the exhilaration of spaceflight and earn amateur astronaut wings.

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