SpaceX is about to send its first crew of private citizens to space - The Verge

Four people are set to launch to space Wednesday night aboard a SpaceX capsule, and none of them are professional astronauts.

Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist, booked the Crew Dragon capsule last year and picked three normal folks to ride with him.

The Inspiration 4 crew is slated to launch Wednesday at 8:02PM ET atop SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, buckled inside the same Crew Dragon capsule that nearly a year ago sent a four-person crew of government astronauts to the International Space Station and back.

That includes centrifuge training to get used to the enormous G-forces of lifting off atop a rocket, a microgravity experience aboard a Zero-G flight, and weeks of training at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California to familiarize the passengers with Crew Dragon.

If all goes as planned, Inspiration 4 will mark the first fully private mission for SpaceX, which developed its Crew Dragon spacecraft as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

That program funded development of two competing space capsules — Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner — to serve as NASA astronauts’ ride to the ISS.

For the Commercial Crew Program, NASA is a customer — not an owner — of the spacecraft, much like Isaacman is the main customer for Inspiration4.

A core goal behind the program was to help stimulate a market for commercial spaceflight, awarding SpaceX roughly $3 billion and Boeing roughly $5 billion to help get started?

But Isaacman’s mission, which will mark the fourth crewed flight for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, a key intent of NASA’s program, has come to fruition.

But whether private space tourism will really be accessible to a larger swath of passengers remains to be seen.

A seat on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon costs roughly $55 million, and a seat on Starliner is somewhere around $90 million, according to government watchdog reports.