Are you ready to go to space? Join TIME and Netflix on Wednesday, September 15 at 7 p.m. ET as we bring you the launch of Inspiration4—the first-ever all-civilian orbital mission—live.
The Inspiration4 crew, including mission commander Jared Issacman, mission pilot and geoscience professor Dr. Sian Proctor, payload specialist and Lockheed Martin aerospace engineer Chris Sembroski, and medical officer and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, has been training for the mission for months. The team has spent hours upon hours in simulators and classrooms, and now they’re ready for the real deal, launching for three days in orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Once in space, the crew will spend time communicating with loved ones, students and space fans back home, as well as conducting various experiments. The launch will be historic in more ways than one, as Arceneaux will become the first person with a prosthetic to fly to space. “People who went to space in the past had to be perfect physical specimens,” she recently told TIME, “and that’s not the case anymore. I’m going to be the first pediatric cancer patient to go, but I won’t be the last.”
To learn more about the Inspiration4 mission, read TIME’s previous coverage. Also be sure to check out TIME Studios’ Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission To Space on Netflix, a docuseries covering everything from the crew members’ unconventional selection and intensive months-long commercial astronaut training to the intimate moments leading up to liftoff.
