The quartet of amateur astronauts, led by the American founder and chief executive of financial services firm Shift4 Payments Inc, Jared Isaacman, lifted off just before sunset from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and the spacecraft roared into the darkened skies.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: A rocket ship blasted off from Florida on Wednesday carrying a billionaire e-commerce executive and three less-wealthy private citizens he chose to join him in the first all-civilian crew ever launched into Earth orbit. The quartet of amateur astronauts, led by the American founder and chief executive of financial services firm Shift4 Payments Inc, Jared Isaacman, lifted off just before sunset from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and the spacecraft roared into the darkened skies. A SpaceX webcast of the launch showed Isaacman,38, and his crewmates – Sian Proctor,51, Hayley Arceneaux,29, and Chris Sembroski,42 – strapped into the pressurized cabin of their gleaming white SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, dubbed Resilience, wearing their helmeted black-and-white flight suits. Thumbs-up were on display as the capsule streaked upward, perched atop one of the company’s reusable two-stage Falcon 9 rockets. The Crew Dragon, fitted with a special observation dome in place of its usual docking hatch, reached orbit almost 10 minutes after the 8:03 p.m. EDT blastoff. The rocket’s first-stage booster, after separating from the spacecraft’s top half, descended back to Earth and touched down safely on a landing platform floating in the Atlantic on a drone ship affectionately named Just Read the Instructions Amid cheers heard in SpaceX’s mission-control center as the spacecraft climbed to nearly 125 miles (200 km) above Earth, Isaacman read a statement thanking everyone who made possible a journey « right to the doorstep of an exciting and unexplored frontier, where few have come before and many are about to follow. » « The door is open now, and it’s pretty incredible, » he said.
