The final two members of a four-person crew scheduled for a historic mission to space later this year have been announced. Christopher Sembroski and Sian Proctor will join previously announced team members Hayley Arceneaux and Jared Isaacman on the world's first all-civilian voyage to the stars.
Shift4 Payments founder and CEO Isaacman financed the Inspiration4 mission and will pilot the autonomous Crew Dragon spacecraft. But the 38-year-old businessman isn't going alone. In collaboration with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, mission commander Isaacman donated a trio of seats to "inspire humanity" and raise money for the Memphis health center.
Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude—the same hospital where she was treated as a child for bone cancer—was the first to join Inspiration4 last month. She will serve as medical officer overseeing medical care and experiments on the mission.
Entrepreneur, educator, and trained pilot Proctor, meanwhile, earned her seat by winning a business competition led by Shift4 Payments. The 51-year-old mission pilot was selected at the top entrant among some 200 entries to the online contest. She will back up the commander and "support related needs" throughout the trip.
"This opportunity is proof that hard work and perseverance can pay off in unimaginable ways," Proctor said in a statement. "I have always believed that I was preparing for something special, and that moment has arrived with Inspiration4."
The final spot went to Sembroski, a 41-year-old Lockheed Martin employee, US Air Force veteran, and one of nearly 72,000 people vying for a seat on the Inspiration4 as part of a St. Jude fundraising campaign.
"Although I've been fortunate to have spent years in the aerospace industry, I never imagined having the opportunity to reach the stars, especially through something as simple as supporting St. Jude," Sembroski said in a statement. He will serve as the mission specialist and will help manage payload, science experiments, communications to mission control, and more.
Each person represents one of the four mission pillars: leadership (Isaacman), hope (Arceneaux), generosity (Sembroski), and prosperity (Proctor). "Inspriation4's goal is to inspire humanity to support St. Jude here on earth while also seeing new possibilities for human spaceflight," Isaacman said. "Each of these outstanding crew members embodies the best of humanity, and I am humbled to lead them on this historic and purposeful mission and the adventure of a lifetime."
The civilians will receive commercial astronaut training—orbital mechanics, operating in microgravity, zero gravity, and other forms of stress testing—and participate in emergency preparedness training, spacesuit and spacecraft ingress and egress exercises, and partial- and full-mission simulations.
Strapped to a reusable Falcon 9 spacecraft, Inspiration4 is set for launch no earlier than Sept. 15, 2021 from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Flying further than any human since Hubble, the team will orbit Earth every 90 minutes for three days, before reentering our atmosphere for a soft water landing off the Atlantic coast.