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One is a 29-year-old physician assistant living in Memphis, a cancer survivor, with metal rods in her left leg that replaced the bones destroyed by a tumor.

Another is a 51-year-old community college professor from Phoenix who fell far short of fulfilling his dream of becoming a NASA astronaut.

Third, a data engineer from western Washington who once served as a counselor at a camp that gave kids what it’s like to be an astronaut.

Fourth, a 38-year-old high school dropout who is the billionaire founder of a payment processing company. It’s paying for an unprecedented space journey where no one is a professional astronaut.

The crew of four is scheduled to launch into space on Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 8:02 p.m. Eastern time on a SpaceX rocket. They will orbit the planet at an altitude higher than the International Space Station for three days.

The task known as inspiration4 is also the first task in which the government is generally a bystander. It’s also far more ambitious and risky than the minute-long excursions to the edge of space that two ultra-rich business celebrities, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, completed in July.

The trip shows that a private citizen with at least a few hundred million dollars and a few months left can now charter a spacecraft to circumnavigate the planet.

In this case, Jared Isaacman is the founder of Shift4 Payments, a company that processes payments for restaurants and other businesses. His public profile is much lower than that of Mr. Branson or Mr. Bezos.

As the two travel in spacecraft operated by the companies they founded, Mr. Isaacman’s flight is led by SpaceX, the private company whose company is led by another billionaire, Elon Musk, whose space business has been upended over the past decade and accomplished what his rivals thought impossible. while offering lower prices for going into space.

A trip like Inspiration4 is still affordable only for the richest of the rich. But it is no longer impossible.

When Mr. Isaacman decided to devote a large share of his fortune, he did not want to bring just a few friends. Instead, he opened up opportunities to three people he didn’t know.

The result is a mission with a team representing the wider community – St. Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old Black community college professor; and Christopher Sembroski, a 42-year-old data engineer.

“We are taking all the training that other NASA astronaut crews have had in the past for all these emergency procedures,” Mr. Sembroski said in an interview last week. It was the last day he and his crewmates spent at home before heading to Florida for the launch.

“I think we’re ready to go into space,” said Mr. Sembroski.

The diverse life stories of the Inspiration4 team stand in stark contrast to Mr. Branson and Mr. Bezos, whose trips are seen by many as blissful journeys for billionaires.

“The world hasn’t seen how that has benefited them,” said Timiebi Aganaba, professor of space and society at Arizona State University, about the Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin flights of Mr Branson and Mr Bezos. “They said, ‘This is just a playground for the rich,'”

With his team of everyone, Mr. Isaacman is trying to achieve a goal of science fiction writers and space enthusiasts: to open space to everyone, not just professional astronauts and wealthy space tourists.

Dr. “The difference with this flight is that we basically have three very ordinary people on the flight, and they’re going to show us what it means to turn it on,” Aganaba said.

Learning to fly an airplane as part of his effort to become a NASA astronaut, Dr. Proctor pointed to Ms. Arceneaux, a cancer survivor who will be the first person to go into space with a prosthesis. He said this expands people’s idea of ​​who can become an astronaut.

As the first Black woman to serve as a pilot of a spacecraft, Dr. “This is one of the reasons why representation is important,” Proctor said. “And access is important.”

The mission also reflects the rising role of private enterprise in space.

“This represents part of the transition to private sector activities in low Earth orbit that NASA has been pushing for several years,” said John M. Logsdon, founder and former director of the George Washington University Space Policy Institute. “High visibility because it includes people. But in essence, it’s just part of a larger movement.”

The mission uses the same Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule that SpaceX developed to take NASA’s astronauts to the International Space Station. Indeed, the capsule that will send Mr. Isaacman and his colleagues around Earth is an exact replica of the Resilience capsule used for a NASA mission launched in November last year. He then returned to Earth in May.

For inspiration, Mr. Isaacman named the four existing seats on the spacecraft to represent the qualities the mission hopes to represent: leadership for himself and hope, generosity and prosperity for fellow passengers.

Providing free cancer care to children, St. When she decided to use this trip to raise money for Jude, she asked the hospital to recommend a frontline health worker to represent hope. Hospital officials introduced Ms. Arceneaux. The generosity seat that went to Mr. Sembroski was taken to St. He raised money for Jude. Later, Mr. Isaacman’s company, Shift4, held a competition for entrepreneurial ideas and Dr. Proctor won the welfare seat. creating a store to sell space-themed artwork He can do it.

However, he noted that Mr. Isaacman paid all the bills, including a February Super Bowl ad promoting the mission to Americans.

Mr. Isaacman declined to say how much he paid, only St. He said it was less than the $200 million he was hoping to raise for Jude.

Dr. “We are still a long way from the fact that normal humans will be able to go into space,” Aganaba said.

The four gained public attention as they prepared for the flight. a Netflix documentary, a Special issue of Time magazine and an Axios podcast.

In the Netflix documentary, Ms. Arceneaux invited her friends to watch the Super Bowl, a small get-together with the film crew. “I told my friends that I really have a big secret,” she said.

His friends thought he would be a contestant on “The Bachelor.” When the Inspiration4 ad ran, “One of them jokingly said, ‘Oh, you’re going to space?’ said. That’s when I said, ‘Yes, I’m actually going to space.

In March, the four began intensive training, including swinging around a giant centrifuge in Pennsylvania, to get used to the crushing forces experienced during takeoff and landing. They flew in an airplane that simulated a freefall experience.

They also spent 30 continuous hours at SpaceX in a Crew Dragon simulator, reviewing contingency plans for multiple emergencies.

“The moment it started, and throughout it all, time flew by so quickly,” said Mr. Isaacman. “We said, we’re going to do it again.”

They did it again with another 10-hour simulation.

Ms. Arceneaux will serve as the flight’s paramedic and will do some research on the crew during the flight. Dr. Proctor will serve as a pilot, although the spacecraft will fly largely on its own. Mr. Sembroski will have various responsibilities as mission specialist, while Mr. Isaacman will be in command of the flight.

It may be years before something like the Inspiration4 is released. The cost of seeing the world from orbit would be far beyond most people’s means. And the effort carries high risks, with many observers reminiscent of the death of Christa McAuliffe, a teacher aboard the space shuttle Challenger when it disintegrated during launch in 1986. Everest

“I would argue that it’s not really a market,” said private space historian Roger D. Launius, who has previously worked at NASA and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “Basically, this is a one-time pleasure journey for people.”

Still, even the fact that the opportunity exists is a big change.

For decades, astronauts were often government employees—people working for NASA or the Soviet space program that launched rockets operated by their government.

During the Obama administration, NASA decided to hire private companies to build spacecraft for trips to the space station. He chose Boeing and SpaceX for the job.

Leveraging a previous contract to send cargo to the space station, SpaceX already had a dominant share in the market for launching commercial satellites with its Falcon 9 rocket.

NASA hopes that federal investment in the Crew Dragon capsule could similarly spur a larger market for getting humans into space. However, this path remains unclear. For now, non-professional space travelers fall into two groups: people with a lot of money and people in the entertainment industry.

Axiom Space, a Houston company, is also scheduled to take off early next year using SpaceX’s Flexibility capsule. The mission will take three people paying $55 million each for a multi-day visit to the International Space Station.

Discovery Channel reality television contest, “Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?” as a reward is to offer a trip to the space station on a later Axiom mission.

The Russian space agency also continued to sell seats on Soyuz rockets for trips to the space station. In October, Russian actress Yulia Peresild and filmmaker Klim Shipenko could go to the space station to shoot movie scenes. They may be followed months later by Japanese fashion entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa.

Mr. Maezawa’s 12-day trip will be a start. Hoping to embark on a more ambitious journey around the moon. in a few years giant SpaceX Starship rocket currently under development. This journey, called Dear Moon, will perhaps be the closest in spirit to Inspiration4. One million entries came in the contest to select eight accompanying persons, and Mr. Maezawa is currently reviewing the finalists.

Ahead of the flight, the crew said at a press conference Tuesday at SpaceX’s hangar at Kennedy Space Center that they were confident and did not feel pre-launch tension.

Dr. “I was always worried that this moment would never come in my life, so I’m ready to go,” Proctor said. “Let’s do this.”