Iran Press/ Sci & Tech: One is a 29-year-old physician assistant living in Memphis, a cancer survivor with metal rods in her left leg to replace bones destroyed by a tumor.
Another is a 51-year-old community college professor from Phoenix who fell just short of achieving her dream of becoming a NASA astronaut, The New York Times reported.
The third is a data engineer living in western Washington who was once a counselor at a camp that offered kids a taste of what it’s like to be an astronaut.
The fourth, 38, is a high school dropout who became a billionaire founder of a payments processing company. He is the one that is paying for a trip into space the likes of which have never been seen before, where no one aboard is a professional astronaut.
This crew of four is scheduled to head to space together, launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday at 8:02 pm Eastern time in a SpaceX rocket. They will orbit the planet for three days at an altitude higher than the International Space Station.
The mission, known as Inspiration 4, is also the first where the government is, by and large, a bystander. It’s also far more ambitious and risky than the minutes-long jaunts to the edge of space completed by two ultrarich business celebrities, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, in July.
The trip shows that a private citizen, at least someone with a couple hundred million dollars and a few months to spare, is now able to essentially rent a spacecraft to circle the planet.
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