SpaceX first private crew motivates kids with cancer from orbit

Cape Canaveral, Florida - The four tourists — two contest winners, a hospital worker and their billionaire sponsor — will wrap up 3-day flight this weekend with a splashdown off the Florida coast

SpaceX’s first space tourists are taking in sweeping views of Earth that few have witnessed and motivating children with cancer.

The capsule’s four passengers are flying exceedingly high, even by NASA standards.

SpaceX got them into a 585-kilometre orbit following Wednesday night’s launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. That’s 100 miles (160 kilometers) higher than the International Space Station. It’s so high that they’re completing 15 orbits of Earth daily, compared with 16 for station astronauts.

Until this all-amateur crew, relatively few Nasa astronauts had soared that high. The most recent were the shuttle astronauts who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope over multiple flights in the 1990s and 2000s.

To enhance the views, SpaceX outfitted the automated Dragon capsule with a custom, bubble-shaped dome. Photos of them looking out this large window were posted online after their first day in space, but otherwise little has been released publicly since liftoff.

The passengers — two contest winners, a hospital worker and their billionaire sponsor — will wrap up their three-day flight this weekend with a splashdown off the Florida coast, weather permitting.

Hayley Arceneaux, a childhood cancer survivor, chatted Thursday with patients at the hospital that saved her life almost 20 years ago: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. According to a tweet, the children wanted to know whether there are cows on the moon — like in the nursery rhyme. The video linkup was not broadcast live.

“Missions like Inspiration4 help advance spaceflight to enable ultimately anyone to go to orbit & beyond,” Musk tweeted on Thursday after chatting with his orbiting pioneers.