Thread by @MorningBrew

One billionaire and three normies currently have the coolest answer to, “What are you doing this week?”

A thread on the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission and why it's the most ambitious space flight to date

The details:

At 8:02pm ET tonight, the four passengers will become the first all-civilian crew to go into orbit, rising about 80 miles higher than the International Space Station at the peak of their three-day joy ride.

Why it matters:

This mission is far more technically difficult than the other billionaires’ space flights this summer because of how much higher and how much longer the trip will take.

Bezos’s Blue Origin flight was the first suborbital all-civilian mission, and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic trip was so suborbital that some question whether he was in space at all.

Billionaire entrepreneur and trained pilot Jared Isaacman booked the whole ship like it’s a table in Vegas for his bachelor party.

Here's who’s joining him:

Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor and physician assistant at St. Jude, will become the youngest person ever to go to space at 29, and the first with a prosthetic body part.

Christopher Sembroski, a Lockheed Martin data engineer, is going in place of his friend who won his ticket through a St. Jude fundraising campaign.

Sian Proctor, a geology professor and former astronaut trainee, won a contest held by Isaacman’s payment processing company, Shift4. She’ll become the fourth Black woman and the first person from Guam to go to space.

The ship is also carrying a lot of merch into orbit, including a ukulele from Martin Guitar and 66 pounds of hops for Samuel Adams—“the official beer of Inspiration4.”

Zoom out: Through its Commercial Crew Program, NASA invested billions in both Boeing and SpaceX to get commercial space flight off the ground.

This is SpaceX’s first all-civilian mission and fourth crewed flight overall, putting it lightyears ahead of Boeing, which has yet to send any humans into space.

But while the Inspiration4 is a milestone for commercial space travel, seats are still far too expensive ($450k a pop for Virgin Galactic) for the average amateur astronaut to afford.

morningbrew.com/daily/stories/…

How to watch: You can stream the mission starting at 3:45pm ET ​​on SpaceX’s YouTube channel. If liftoff is delayed for any reason, SpaceX will try again Thursday night.