SpaceX’s first space tourists are back on Earth

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• SpaceX’s first space tourists have returned to Earth and splashed down off the coast of Florida.
• The Inspiration4 mission orbited Earth for three days aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship.
• It was the world’s first all-tourist flight to orbit, but SpaceX already has another planned.

SpaceX and its four passengers have emerged victorious at the conclusion of the world’s first all-tourist flight to orbit.

The company’s Crew Dragon spaceship splashed down off the coast of Florida on Saturday at 7:06 p.m. ET, carrying four amateur spacefarers: billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, geoscientist and science communicator Dr. Sian Proctor, physician-assistant Hayley Arceneaux, and engineer Chris Sembroski. None of them are professional astronauts.

“That was a heck of a ride for us, and we’re just getting started,” Isaacman said on the livestream after the splashdown.

The group came together after Isaacman chartered the flight from SpaceX and gave away three seats through a raffle and fund-raising partnership with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. He called the mission Inspiration4.

The crew spent three days orbiting Earth aboard the Dragon capsule. They flew as high as 367 miles (590 kilometers) — farther from the planet than anyone has traveled since the Space Shuttle era. They took cognitive tests and scanned their organs with an ultrasound for scientific research. Sembroski played ukelele. Proctor made art. They all admired the views.

On Saturday evening, the Crew Dragon fired its thrusters to push itself into a high-speed plummet to Earth. Tiles on the spaceship’s underbelly protected its passengers as friction superheated the atmosphere around it to a 3,500-degree-Fahrenheit plasma.

A few miles above Earth’s surface, parachutes ballooned from the capsule, likely giving the passengers a significant jolt as the spaceship slowed its fall.

The Crew Dragon dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and bobbed there like a toasted marshmallow, caked in soot from the fiery descent. It’s not the first time this particular capsule, named Resilience, has weathered such a fall: It’s the same ship that flew SpaceX’s first full astronaut crew to the International Space Station for NASA last year, then brought them home in May.

The Inspiration4 crew’s safe return is a major step in a new era of space tourism.

NASA didn’t run this mission; SpaceX did, to Isaacman’s specifications. He chose the length of the flight, the altitude, the crew, and their activities in orbit. He even contributed his own idea — a climb up Mount Rainier — to their nearly six-month training regimen.

SpaceX already has another tourist flight lined up for January. For that mission, called AX-1, the company Axiom Space chartered a Crew Dragon to take customers to the space station for eight days.