Meet the Inspiration4 Team, the World’s First Non-Astronaut Space Crew
April 23, 2021 at 05:36PM Sian Proctor may owe her life to Apollo 11—literally. Born in Guam—the daughter of an engineer who worked at the local tracking station that helped NASA maintain communications with its lunar crews—she was the fourth child of a couple that she suspects did not plan for so many kids, and came into the world just nine months after Apollo 11 stuck its historic first moon landing. “I think I was a celebration baby,” she says with a laugh. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for human space flight.” Proctor herself has a lot to celebrate this year. Come September, if all goes to plan, the 51-year-old professor of geoscience at South Mountain University in Phoenix will climb aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and rocket into low-Earth orbit, spending up to three days aloft before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, won’t be the first aboard a SpaceX ship to carry crew; it won’t even be the second or the third. What it ...