The four crew members of the first amateur astronaut space flight return to Earth

The four crew members of the first privately organized three-day orbital excursion, managed by the SpaceX company, returned to Earth this Saturday without incident.

The space tourists landed in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida after three days in space, culminating the first mission in history without a professional astronaut on board.

The flight, called Inspiration4, took off on September 16 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket and reached an altitude in orbit of 585 kilometers around three hours later.

Orbiting at about 28,000 km / h, the space tourists circled the world more than 15 times a day.

During a live broadcast of the landing, picked up by CNN, the billionaire and mission commander, Jared Isaacman, thanked the company for the experience.

"It has been an extraordinary journey for us and it has only just begun," he commented shortly after hitting the water.

A SpaceX ship immediately recovered the capsule, before its hatch opened and the space tourists, smiling and waving their arms in the air, emerged one by one.

Crew of @ Inspiration4x - first all-civilian human spaceflight to orbit - returns to Earth pic.twitter.com/pnjkDjnkAw

- SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 18, 2021

The orbital excursion marks the first time that a team entirely composed of civilians has made a trip into space. Pricing for the mission has not been disclosed, but presumably Isaacman, a tech mogul who bought the mission, paid SpaceX tens of millions of dollars for this experience. The other seats were taken by Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old medical assistant who became the youngest American to go into space; Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old geography teacher; and Chris Sembroski, 42, an alumnus of the United States Air Force. Before the trip, the four trained for only about six months, while professional astronauts spend years preparing.

Once in orbit, they collected data such as their heart rate, sleep, blood oxygen saturation, cognitive abilities, and so on, which should help better understand the effect of the space environment on beginners.

It is the first of several private space flights that Elon Musk's company is planning for the next few years, with the next scheduled for early 2022, the Bloomberg agency has reported.

In addition to serving as a proof-of-concept demonstration flight, the mission has also served to raise $ 200 million in donations for childhood cancer research.

This mission ends a boreal summer marked by multimillionaire flights into space.

The first was Richard Branson, on July 11, who took off aboard the Virgin Galactic spacecraft, and a few days later Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, with his company Blue Origin.

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