With Monday night’s (Sept. 15) launch of SpaceX’s Inspiration4 mission, the number of humans in space increased by one to a record-setting 14.
There are a total of 14 people in this group, and they are all now residing on three separate spaceships. The Inspiration4 crew — Jared Isaacman, Hayley Arceneaux, Sian Proctor and Chris Sembroski — are speeding around Earth in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spaceship.
Spacexs Inspiration4 Launch Boosts Population of Space to Record
Meanwhile, seven people—Shane NASA’s Kimbrough, Megan McArthur, and Mark Vande Hei; Russia’s Pyotr Dubrov and Oleg Novitskiy; Japan’s Akihiko Hoshide; and Europe’s Thomas Pesquet—are living aboard the International Space Station right now. Tianhe, the primary module of China’s future Tiangong space station, is home to Chinese astronauts Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming, and Tang Hongbo.
“May the crew of Inspiration 4 have the best of luck!” Before SpaceX’s launch, Vande Hei posted on Twitter(opens in new tab). “Planned private astronaut missions will assist NASA in meeting its future needs. Those missions pave the way for a thriving market in low-Earth orbit, a market in which NASA will be just one customer. The muse has commanded you to move forth. Go!”
The population of astronauts, however, will soon begin to decline. Shenzhou 12 mission of Nie, Liu, and Tang is rumoured to terminate early Friday morning, while Inspiration4 is scheduled to return to Earth on Saturday (Sept. 18). (Sept. 17). (China typically doesn’t provide many specifics about its human spaceflight plans in advance, so the obscurity surrounding Shenzhou 12 is par for the course.)
Nie, Liu and Tang arrived in Tianhe on June 17. They’ve now been in space for three months, which is roughly three times as long as any previous Chinese crewed expedition.
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The previous record of 13 space travellers in orbit at the same time has been broken on multiple occasions. In March of 1995, for instance, seven astronauts flew around the Earth on NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour, while six others did the same on Russia’s Mir space station. Also, back in March of 2009, 13 astronauts lived aboard the ISS for a while.
