Meet the Inspiration4 Team, the World ’s First Non-Professional Astronaut Space Crew

Sian Proctor may owe her life to Apollo 11—literally. Born in Guam—the daughter of an engineer who worked at the local tracking station that helped NASA maintain communications with its lunar crews—she was the fourth child of a couple that she suspects did not plan for so many kids, and came into the world just nine months after Apollo 11 stuck its historic first moon landing. “I think I was a celebration baby,” she says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for human space flight.” Proctor herself has a lot to celebrate this year. Come September, if all goes to plan, the 51-year-old professor of geoscience at South Mountain University in Phoenix will climb aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and rocket into low-Earth orbit, spending up to three days aloft before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, won’t be the first aboard a SpaceX ship to carry crew; it won’t even be the second or the third. What it will be is the first flight aboard any spacecraft flown by any country or company to be crewed entirely by non-astronauts—four people who until this past February did not know they would be flying to space at all, and now will go to a place that fewer than 600 people in the world have ever gone before. “I thought a flight like this was a decade away,” says Proctor. “But it’s now.” (As previously reported, TIME Studios has secured e...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news