KIRKLAND, Wash. — It’s been seven months since Chris Sembroski splashed down on the finish of the world’s first all-civilian orbital area mission, however his drive to hunt out new frontiers remains to be going robust.
The 42-year-old knowledge engineer from Everett, Wash., received his spot on final September’s philanthropic Inspiration4 area journey due to a good friend of his who received a lottery, however weighed an excessive amount of to benefit from the prize.
For months, Sembroski took break day from his day job at Lockheed Martin to coach along with his three crewmates: Jared Isaacman, the billionaire tech CEO who organized and paid for the mission; Hayley Arceneaux, a most cancers survivor who now works for St. Jude Youngsters’s Analysis Hospital; and Sian Proctor, a geology professor who parlayed her abilities in artwork and enterprise to win a “Shark Tank”-style contest.
Their coaching included a Mount Rainier climb, zero-G and high-G airplane rides, and hours upon hours of instruction from SpaceX. All of it got here to a climax with the foursome’s launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, adopted by three days of experiments and outreach actions that raised greater than $240 million for St. Jude.
A follow-up sequence of area missions, often known as the Polaris Program, is anticipated to blaze extra new trails for citizen astronauts — and generate much more contributions for most cancers analysis.
Sembroski, in the meantime, is beginning a brand new job as an information analytics engineer at DB Engineering in Redmond, Wash. In an interview performed final week throughout an area trade social occasion at SigmaDesign’s Kirkland workplace, Sembroski talked about how he came upon he was getting a free journey to orbit, what he skilled throughout the mission, and what he expects from his subsequent journey.
