Background:
- Elon Musk’s SpaceX recently announced that ‘Inspiration-4,’ the company’s first all-civilian, non-government mission, will launch on September 15.
- NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is preparing to launch the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
- A party of four private citizens will be sent into space for three days.
Who will undergo the journey:
- Jared Isaacman, the creator of the financial business Shift4 Payments, has purchased all four seats aboard the spacecraft.
- This is part of a fundraising campaign for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, a paediatric treatment and research institution that specializes in children’s catastrophic diseases, such as leukemia and other malignancies.
- current events
What is Inspiration-4 Mission and how does it work:
- The mission entails three days of orbiting the Earth before splashing into the Atlantic Ocean.
- Inspiration-4 will orbit the Earth at a distance of 575 kilometers, exceeding the International Space Station (408 kilometers) and the Hubble Space Telescope (547km).
- This will be the longest journey by a crewed mission since 2009, when astronauts returned to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.
- The Dragon module that the party will be employing for the operation has also been updated.
What is the significance of the journey:
- The expedition, according to sources, will provide an opportunity to collect vast volumes of health data that will aid in the design of future crewed space flights.
- This will also aid in the evaluation of behavioural and cognitive changes as the journey progresses.
- Inspiration4 is considered as part of an initiative to open up space travel to non-professionals, similar to the previous space adventures of billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.
Source: THE HINDU.
Related Posts
Archaeological Survey of India (ASI)
Posted on
