Will space missions include more average people?

By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor

It sounds like the kind of purely hypothetical question you ask as an icebreaker at a cocktail party: If you could take three people with you to spend three days orbiting Earth, who would you pick?

That’s essentially what billionaire Jared Isaacman got to do for the Inspiration4 mission, which is slated to launch as soon as later tonight carrying the world’s first entirely civilian crew on a commercially built rocket. Isaacman spent an undisclosed amount to charter a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and blast himself and three crewmates to an altitude of 360 miles—higher than the orbit of the International Space Station. The four-person team (pictured above during altitude chamber training) will spend three days circling the planet before splashing down off the Florida coast.

Isaacman is already a trained jet pilot, and to his credit, he didn’t simply round up three of his best chums for the orbital ride. For this historic flight, he made a point to use the mission as a fundraising campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee. One seat was donated to St. Jude physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, a former cancer patient turned staffer who will become the first person with a prosthesis to go to space. The second seat goes to Chris Sembroski, a data engineer who entered a raffle by donating money to St. Jude. Sembroski was among 72,000-odd people who donated, raising a total of $13 million for the hospital. The final seat goes to Sian Proctor (pictured training below), a geosciences professor who won her spot by entering a contest for digital entrepreneurs.

Isaacman’s crew has its advantages. An experienced pilot, a medical specialist, a scientist, and an engineer sound like solid picks. But the crew selection process was definitely not as rigorous as a traditional NASA mission. Professional astronaut crews are hand-picked by mission managers for their complementary skills and expertise in mission objectives. They then spend years training together in various environments—from underwater labs to deep caves—so they can build rapport and communication skills. By contrast, the Inspiration4 crew only got started on their prep work this past February. They climbed Mount Rainier together in addition to more standard astronaut training activities such as centrifuge runs, classroom lectures, and simulator/weightlessness drills (pictured below). But assuming everything goes to plan, they will become the first humans in orbit who never went through any official government training.

Spending three days in a tight space with relative strangers inside and the lethal void of space outside has never exactly been high on my personal bucket list. Still, the mission feels aptly named, since it is inspiring to see people who don’t come from the rarified ranks of the astronaut corps taking on this challenge. Now the big question is whether missions like this one will ever become truly affordable to anyone who isn’t personally rich or selected by a billionaire—and what that might eventually mean for humankind’s future on and beyond Earth?

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