I have a great interest to read about Elon Musk's another incredible achievement by his private rocket company: Elon Musk's SpaceX Launches First All-Civilian Flight to Orbit. Excerpt:
Elon Musk's SpaceX on Wednesday evening launched four civilians toward the deepest orbit Americans have traveled to in more than a decade in another milestone flight for private space travel.
A Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon space capsule on top lifted off with a fiery plume from a pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida just after 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, according to a live stream of the takeoff...
The space flight Wednesday marks new terrain for a commercial space industry that has attracted entrepreneurs and investors who are betting on an expanding set of business opportunities beyond Earth.
For the first time, an all-civilian crew is traveling to orbit on a mission arranged entirely by private parties. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of payments-processing company Shift4 Payments Inc., purchased the trip for an undisclosed sum from SpaceX and is commanding the mission. Previous travelers to orbit had to secure seats on Russian government-controlled rockets to venture that deep into space.
Three people joined Mr. Isaacman on the flight, which has a charitable component. They are Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and science communicator; Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor who now works as a physician assistant; and Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace industry employee.
Here is a snapshot of the Falcon 9 on its way to orbit. And it's pretty remarkable that it was taken from an iPhone:
......."Over the last few months, it was certainly fun to watch Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos compete for the spotlight in their race to be "first" with commercial space tourism. Branson's Virgin Galactic flights take about an hour and allow participants to experience zero gravity, but they never get above the Kármán line – the altitude recognized as being the delineation between Earth's atmosphere and space.
Bezos' Blue Origin flight does make it above the Kármán line, but it's a much shorter flight. After all, unlike Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin launches on a rocket. It basically goes straight up and straight down… no dilly-dallying around. The trip to space takes about 11 minutes.
But this SpaceX flight is in a different league entirely. It makes the efforts of Bezos and Branson look like child's play.
In yet another flawless SpaceX mission, Elon Musk and his team sent four civilians not only into space, but into orbit at an altitude higher than the International Space Station. In fact, the crew is now in orbit at an altitude higher than any human-piloted spaceflight mission to Earth's orbit except for the Gemini 10 and 11 missions back in 1966.
If that isn't enough, SpaceX returned the Falcon 9 booster to Earth so that it can be reused again.
And what may come as a surprise to many is that the entire flight, orbit, and return to Earth is fully autonomous. That's right – the crew doesn't have to do a thing. They just monitor the screens in the Crew Dragon capsule and enjoy the view for a few days." by Jeff Brown
You may want to also watch the Netflix (NFLX) documentary about this, Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission To Space. You can watch the trailer for it here.
As an investor for SpaceX, I cannot be more proud of being part of this venture. Along with it, my investment capital has already been more than double after several rounds of financing. These days, it is very difficult to get shares of SpaceX, which are often a lot more expensive than what is priced, even if you are lucky to be able to get it via secondary offering. That's how much demanded right now, a red hot pre-IPO stock everyone is willing to chase. 😏💪
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