SpaceX has launched a billionaire-funded crew of space tourists toward orbit - the first civilian mission of its kind

• SpaceX's first all-civilian crew has lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
• The Inspiration4 mission is sending four people into orbit for three days aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship.
• In space, the crew members will do scientific research, make art, and take in the views.
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A SpaceX rocket screaming into the skies above Cape Canaveral, Florida is lifting something no orbital rocket ever has before: a spaceship filled with amateurs.

Regular people and wealthy tourists have launched into Earth's orbit before, but always accompanied by professional astronauts. All four people who lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket at 8:02 p.m. ET on Wednesday are civilians with non-astronaut day jobs. They're a billionaire high-school dropout, a geoscientist, a physician-assistant, and an engineer.

The group has been training for a little over five months. Now they're on their way to orbit Earth for three days, venturing farther from our planet than any human has since 2009. Their mission is called Inspiration4.

The group launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, but otherwise the government agency has nothing to do with this.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman chartered the flight from SpaceX and is both footing the bill and commanding the company's Crew Dragon spaceship. He gave the other three seats to Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist who serves as an analogue astronaut in simulations of long-term Mars missions; Hayley Arceneaux, who survived bone cancer as a child and now works at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital; and Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran who works for Lockheed Martin.

"I can't express enough how appreciative we are of this amazing opportunity, we know that the four of us are about to have an experience that only about 600 or so had before us," Isaacman said in a press conference on Tuesday. "We're very focused on making sure that we give back every bit of that time that we get on orbit for the people and the causes that matter most to us."

Through the flight, Isaacman aims to raise a total of $200 million for St. Jude for pediatric-cancer research by asking for donations online and auctioning items the crew is taking to space. That's in addition to $100 million he's already donated himself.

"There are real problems and real obligations we have to pay attention to here on Earth in order to earn the right to make progress for tomorrow," Isaacman said.

If all goes according to plan in the minutes ahead, the Falcon 9 rocket will carry the spaceship close to orbit, then the booster will detach and fall back to Earth to fly again another day. After that, the rocket's upper stage should give the Crew Dragon a final push before it, too, breaks away.

That should leave the Crew Dragon and its passengers drifting above our planet 13 minutes after liftoff. The spaceship's cabin - where the four crew members will spend the next three days - has about as much room as a walk-in closet.

Once in orbit, the group can strip off their spacesuits. They plan to eat cold pizza for dinner.

Science, art, and views from 355 miles above Earth

Since Inspiration4 isn't going to the space station, SpaceX replaced the port the spaceship usually uses for docking with a rounded window - a cupola. This glass dome has never flown to space before. It's designed for a spaceship passenger's most memorable experience: the views.

While they're in orbit, as high as 355 miles Earth, the crew will enjoy 15 sunrises and sunsets each day.

To pass the time, they plan to collect data for research about how spaceflight affects the human body. Since they're going so high, they'll be exposed to more radiation than astronauts on the space station, which orbits at an altitude of about 250 miles. Data about how that affects the passengers' bodies could inform research and planning related to longer-term human spaceflight to places like the moon and Mars.

So Isaacman, Proctor, Arceneaux, and Sembroski will take each other's vitals, draw blood samples, scan their organs with an ultrasound device, and take cognitive tests on a tablet.

They'll also carve out time for fun. Sembroski brought a ukulele to play. Proctor brought paints and markers.

Then, come Saturday or early Sunday, the Crew Dragon will fire its thrusters to push itself into the atmosphere. This will initiate a high-speed, fiery plummet. Tiles on the spaceship's underbelly must protect its passengers as friction superheats the air around it to a 3,500-degree-Fahrenheit plasma. Then the spaceship must deploy parachutes to drift to an ocean splashdown.

Crew Dragon has carried NASA astronauts on this return journey twice without incident.

SpaceX developed the spaceship for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a competition that awarded funding to facilitate the development of commercial spacecraft. The goal was to make human spaceflight from the US possible again, since no spaceship had launched people from the US since 2011, when the Space Shuttle Program ended. SpaceX broke that dry spell when it flew its first astronauts in May 2020.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.