A few weeks after Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, Elon Musk is also preparing a private trip into space.

Unlike the other two multibillionaires, he will not be on board himself.

But the flight from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, scheduled for Wednesday evening American time, would set a new milestone in space tourism in several ways.

If successful, it will be the first manned mission of the Musk-led space company SpaceX that does not involve any professional astronauts, only private individuals.

And it will be the first such trip that leads far beyond the limit of space into orbit.

Roland Lindner

Business correspondent in New York.

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The flight from Bezos with his company Blue Origin went as far as the Kármán Line, which is a hundred kilometers above sea level and is often described as the boundary between the earth's atmosphere and space.

Branson's journey with his space specialist Virgin Galactic was a few miles below it.

The now planned mission with SpaceX is expected to reach an altitude of around 580 kilometers.

That is even deeper into space than the ISS space station, which is a little more than 400 kilometers from Earth.

Six months preparation time for the space tourists

There is a lot of hype about the private mission, which has been named "Inspiration4". A documentary series entitled “Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space” has just started on the video service Netflix, in which the preparations of the four-man crew are shown and in which Musk can also be seen in interviews. The last, not yet published part should also document the flight itself.

Although Musk is not part of the crew, there is another, if not quite as rich, billionaire, 38-year-old Jared Isaacman. He paid for the trip and is leading the crew. He is the founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, a specialist in payment systems, Forbes puts his fortune at 2.4 billion dollars. A seasoned pilot, he has described the space adventure as a charity aimed at raising $ 200 million for a hospital specializing in childhood cancer.

He did not reveal how much Isaacman SpaceX paid for the flight, he just said it was significantly less than the $ 200 million he wants to raise in donations.

He has given a seat on the mission to a medical assistant in the hospital, the other passengers have won competitions advertised by him.

The crew spent six months preparing for the flight, primarily at SpaceX's California headquarters.

Among other things, there was weightlessness training.

The spacecraft is supposed to steer itself automatically, but some of the crew members also learned to take control if this were necessary.

32 kilograms of hops in the middle of space

In addition to the crew, there should also be various other things on board. Among other things, 32 kilograms of hops are said to fly, which the brewery group Samuel Adams plans to use in a special beer afterwards. The crew will be in space for a total of three days and circle the earth. That is significantly longer than the recent trips by Branson and Bezos. Branson's flight took about an hour, the trip from Bezos only about ten minutes.

The civilian crew of SpaceX is said to be in a Crew Dragon space capsule, which is brought into space by a Falcon 9 rocket. These are the same machines that SpaceX also uses on its manned missions for the space agency NASA, which this time only plays a spectator role. The company has been a partner of NASA for years. It has completed many supply flights to the ISS and last year brought astronauts from American soil into space for the first time since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011.

SpaceX has now carried out three such manned missions, and another is scheduled for the end of October, when the German Matthias Maurer will be among the astronauts. SpaceX is also preparing other space tourism projects. A Japanese billionaire has booked a trip around the moon with the company. However, it will take some time before it can start. Elon Musk has not yet said when he could possibly fly into space himself.