Science Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Sep 15, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC SpaceX is set to launch the first fully private crew of passengers to orbit on Wednesday. The Inspiration4 crew, three ordinary people and a billionaire philanthropist who’s funding the mission, will board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule on Wednesday afternoon and lift off at 8:02PM ET atop a Falcon 9 rocket, speeding toward an orbit 360 miles above the ground — farther from Earth than the International Space Station. If all goes according to plan, the mission will mark a new milestone in the budding commercial space industry, where companies owned by billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have been racing to normalize space travel for people other than government astronauts. The mission also aims to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children’s Hospital to help fund cancer research. Jared Isaacman, a trained pilot and the wealthy founder of a payment processing company, will helm the mission as its commander. He bought four seats on Crew Dragon and picked three fellow passengers: Hayley Arceneaux, a cancer survivor and St. Jude physician assistant, was tapped for the mission through St. Jude. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist and former NASA astronaut candidate, won a video contest hosted by Isaacman’s company, Shift4, for her seat. And Christopher Sembroski, a data engineer at Lockheed Martin, is filling the seat reserved for one of the thousands who donated to St. Jude; his ticket was passed on to him by a friend who won. The Space Force’s weather squadron predicts a 90 percent chance of favorable weather at liftoff time, Related