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No astronauts aboard: four private citizens launch to orbit atop a Falcon 9

Jared Isaacman, Sian Proctor, Hayley Arceneaux and Christopher Sembroski rode Crew Dragon Resilience toward an altitude no one has reached since 1999.

No orbital spaceflight had ever flown without at least one professional astronaut aboard. That changed just after midnight on September 16, 2021, when a Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A carrying Crew Dragon Resilience and four private citizens: Jared Isaacman, Sian Proctor, Hayley Arceneaux and Christopher Sembroski. None had flown to space before. Their three-day mission, named Inspiration4, aimed to raise $100 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital…

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More from September 16

Washington's men chase the British off Harlem Heights, and hold

A morning ambush of Knowlton's Rangers turns into a two-hour firefight in a buckwheat field, and this time the Americans don't run.

The Mayflower clears Plymouth harbor, alone, bound for Virginia

The Speedwell has already been left behind as unseaworthy; 102 passengers now cross alone.

Yeltsin stops at a Texas supermarket and asks what it costs to feed a family

Twenty minutes at Randalls #30 in Webster leaves the Soviet leader stunned into silence on the flight to Miami.

The Montreal agreement turns two years of scientific alarm into binding limits on CFCs.

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Read the full September 16 edition →Everything that happened on September 16 →

More from Modern America

Thirty-three years after his death, the Air Force finally makes Eugene Bullard an officer

France called him a hero and gave him a pilot's license in 1917; his own country waited until 1994 to make it official.

Voyager 1 leaves the Sun's bubble; no craft has gone farther

Thirty-five years after launch, its instruments detect the plasma signature of true interstellar space.

Katrina comes ashore at Buras; hours later, New Orleans is drowning

Fifty-three levee and floodwall breaches put 80 percent of the city underwater by nightfall.

Two Stanford dropouts-in-waiting file the papers; Google is now a company

A hundred-thousand-dollar check written to a firm that didn't legally exist yet just cleared.

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