Nietypowa droga astronauty do odbycia lotu kosmicznego.He won a trip to space. Then he gave it away to a friendby Marcia Dunn January 27, 2022
This photo provided by Kyle Hippchen shows him, right, with Chris Sembroski near launch complex 39A in Cape Canaveral, Fla., on April 21, 2021. Hippchen says Sembroski is the one person "who lives and breathes" space stuff like he does. Credit: Courtesy Kyle Hippchen via APHe told his family and a few friends. He dropped hints to a couple of colleagues. So hardly anyone knew that the airline pilot could have—should have—been on board when SpaceX launched its first tourists into orbit last year.
Meet Kyle Hippchen, the real winner of a first-of-its-kind sweepstakes, who gave his seat to his college roommate.
Though Hippchen's secret is finally out, that doesn't make it any easier knowing he missed his chance to orbit Earth because he exceeded the weight limit. He still hasn't watched the Netflix series on the three-day flight purchased by a tech entrepreneur for himself and three guests last September.
"It hurts too much," he said. "I'm insanely disappointed. But it is what it is."
Hippchen, 43, a Florida-based captain for Delta's regional carrier Endeavor Air, recently shared his story with The Associated Press during his first visit to NASA's Kennedy Space Center since his lost rocket ride.
He opened up about his out-of-the-blue, dream-come-true windfall, the letdown when he realized he topped SpaceX's weight restrictions of 250 pounds (113 kilograms) and his offer to the one person he knew would treasure the flight as much as himself. Four months later, he figures probably fewer than 50 people know he was the actual winner.
Kyle Hippchen, a Florida-based airline captain, poses for a photo in front of a SpaceX Dragon capsule at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. Hippchen, the real winner of a first-of-its-kind sweepstakes, gave his seat on a SpaceX flight to his college roommate. Though his secret is finally out, that doesn't make it any easier knowing he missed his chance to orbit Earth because he exceeded the weight limit. Credit: AP Photo/John Raoux"It was their show, and I didn't want to be distracting too much from what they were doing," said Hippchen, who watched the launch from a VIP balcony.
His seat went to Chris Sembroski, 42, a data engineer in Everett, Washington. The pair roomed together starting in the late 1990s while attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. They'd pile into cars with other student space geeks and make the hourlong drive south for NASA's shuttles launches. They also belonged to a space advocacy group, going to Washington to push commercial space travel.
Despite living on opposite coasts, Hippchen and Sembroski continued to swap space news and champion the cause. Neither could resist when Shift4 Payments founder and CEO Jared Isaacman raffled off a seat on the flight he purchased from SpaceX's Elon Musk. The beneficiary was St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Hippchen snapped up $600 worth of entries. Sembroski, about to start a new job at Lockheed Martin, shelled out $50. With 72,000 entries in the random drawing last February, neither figured he'd win and didn't bother telling the other.
This selfie photo provided by Chris Sembroski shows him, right, with Kyle Hippchen on April 21, 2021. Hippchen says Sembroski is the one person "who lives and breathes" space stuff like he does. Credit: Chris Sembroski via APBy early March, Hippchen started receiving vague emails seeking details about himself. That's when he read the contest's small print: The winner had to be under 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds (2 meters and 113 kilograms).
Hippchen was 5-foot-10 and 330 pounds (1.8 meters and 150 kilograms).
He told organizers he was pulling out, figuring he was only one of many finalists. In the flurry of emails and calls that followed, Hippchen was stunned to learn he'd won.
With a September launch planned, the timeline was tight. Still new at flying people, SpaceX needed to start measuring its first private passengers for their custom-fitted flight suits and capsule seats. As an aerospace engineer and pilot, Hippchen knew the weight limit was a safety issue involving the seats, and could not be exceeded.
"I was trying to figure how I could drop 80 pounds in six months, which, I mean, it's possible, but it's not the most healthy thing in the world to do," Hippchen said.
Kyle Hippchen, a Florida-based airline captain who was the winner of a SpaceX sweepstakes, poses for a photo at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Friday, Jan. 21, 2022. Hippchen and Chris Sembroski roomed together in the late 1990s while attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. They'd pile into cars with other student space geeks and make the hourlong drive south for NASA's shuttles launches. They also belonged to a space advocacy group, marching to Washington to push commercial space travel. Credit: AP Photo/John RaouxIsaacman introduced his passengers at the end of March: a St. Jude physician assistant who beat cancer there as a child; a community college educator who was Shift4 Payments' winning business client; and Sembroski.
"Kyle's willingness to gift his seat to Chris was an incredible act of generosity," he said in an email this week.
Hippchen joined them in April to watch SpaceX launch astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA, the company's last crew flight before their own.
In gratitude, Sembroski offered to take personal items into space for Hippchen. He gathered his high school and college rings, airline captain epaulets, a great-uncle's World War I Purple Heart and odds and ends from his best friends from high school, warning, "Don't ask any details."
By launch day on Sept. 15, word had gotten around. As friends and families gathered for the liftoff, Hippchen said the conversation went like this: "My name's Kyle. Are you The Kyle? Yeah, I'm The Kyle."
Before climbing into SpaceX's Dragon capsule, Sembroski followed tradition and used the phone atop the launch tower to make his one allotted call. He called Hippchen and thanked him one more time.
"I'm forever grateful," Sembroski said.
And while Hippchen didn't get to see Earth from orbit, he did get to experience about 10 minutes of weightlessness. During Sembroski's flight, he joined friends and family of the crew on a special zero-gravity plane.
"It was a blast."https://phys.org/news/2022-01-won-space-gave-friend.htmlKyle Hippchen won a trip on a SpaceX rocket. Then gave it away to a friendFri 28 Jan 2022
(...) Hippchen snapped up $US600 ($850) worth of entries.
Sembroski, about to start a new job at Lockheed Martin, shelled out $US50 ($70).
With 72,000 entries in the random draw last February, neither figured he'd win and didn't bother telling the other.
A big problem in the small printBy early March, Hippchen started receiving vague emails seeking details about himself.
That's when he read the contest's small print: The winner had to be under 2 metres and 113 kilograms.
Hippchen was 1.8m and 150kg.
He told organisers he was pulling out, figuring he was only one of many finalists. (...)
Before climbing into SpaceX's Dragon capsule, Sembroski followed tradition and used the phone atop the launch tower to make his one allotted call. He called Hippchen and thanked him one more time.
"I'm forever grateful," Sembroski said.
And while Hippchen didn't get to see Earth from orbit, he did get to experience about 10 minutes of weightlessness.
During Sembroski's flight, he joined friends and family of the crew on a special zero-gravity plane.
"It was a blast." (...)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-28/the-man-who-gave-away-his-spacex-seat/100787726Chris Sembroski, Gig Harbor’s civilian astronaut, chases dream of space flight for the massesPosted on March 5th, 2025 By: Ted Kenney
Colorful, enlarged photos of Chris Sembroski’s most memorable travel experience hang in the entry hall of his Gig Harbor home.
Neighbors might display shots from Disneyland, or more exotically, an African safari or Himalayan trek. But Sembroski’s shots are unique, even out-of-this-world. Literally.
Taken from a great distance, they show the curve of planet Earth, strikingly blue and white against the black void of space. It’s a view he enjoyed as a crew member of Inspiration4, a 3-day mission aboard a spacecraft shot into orbit by Elon Musk’s SpaceX space technology company in 2021.
Chris Sembroski of Gig Harbor with one of his favorite travel photos. Photo by Ted KenneySembroski, who will speak at the 30th anniversary breakfast of the Peninsula Schools Education Foundation (PSEF) on Thursday, March 6, is a civilian astronaut. He is almost certainly the only Gig Harborite who has gone to space in a SpaceX rocket (or in any kind of rocket), orbited the earth, and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean.
From Gig Harbor to the great beyond
Inspiration4’s mission, and Sembroski’s role in it, are chronicled in the Netflix docuseries Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space.
Yet Sembroski is firmly rooted in the Gig Harbor community. He and his family live in an ordinary subdivision in the Harbor Hill development. He was recruited for the PSEF event by someone who knows his wife, Erin, a teacher at Goodman Middle School.
The education foundation event’s theme is Mission to Inspire. Sembroski said he will talk about the importance of STEM education.
It’s a topic he knows well, having graduated from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics — a STEM-oriented 2-year public boarding high school — and from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the nation’s best-known university specializing in aviation and aerospace.
Sembroski put this academic training to use, first in the U.S. Air Force, maintaining a fleet of intercontinental ballistic missiles and deploying to Iraq. Later, in the private sector, he used data-driven methods in building automation and engineering, optimizing energy consumption, maintenance and other aspects of facilities including data centers, hospitals and aerospace manufacturing plants.
He also worked in avionics at the Jeff Bezos-founded space technology company Blue Origin, commuting some 70 miles round-trip each day between Gig Harbor and the firm’s Kent headquarters. Taking that job earned Sembroski some razzing from former colleagues at Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a direct competitor. His answer to them was that unfortunately, SpaceX doesn’t build rockets in the Seattle area, but “lucky for me, Blue Origin was founded here.”
Early interest in space and aeronautics
Sembroski’s path to space began in childhood, moving around the southeast as his mother rose in her career as a biomedical engineer. He attended elementary school in Florida, middle school in Georgia and high school in North Carolina.
Early on, living on the stretch of Florida’s Atlantic coast that includes Cape Canaveral, he started building model rockets, graduating to increasingly powerful models. This put him in contact with workers from the nearby aerospace complex.
“People who worked on the Space Coast also loved building model rockets,” he said.
Attending the specialized math and science high school deepened Sembroski’s interest in space, with activities like taking telescopes to the school’s roof and looking up at galaxies and comets. A partner in these activities was his roommate Kyle Hippchen, who would later be best man at his wedding — and a critical link in the serendipitous chain of events taking Sembroski into space.
In fall 1997, Sembroski watched the Space Shuttle Columbia’s nighttime launch at Kennedy Space Center. He was 18 years old and had just started college. When the solid booster rockets lit, “you could have read by the light of it,” he said.
While in college, he worked as a counselor for Space Camp, an educational program in Huntsville, Alabama, on the grounds of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. With Hippchen, Sembroski lobbied for passage of two commercial space acts, in 1998 and 2003, that opened up space exploration for private companies and encouraged NASA to work with the commercial sector.
But even with his growing passion for space, “I had no crazy idea that I would have a single chance of flying into space ever,” Sembroski said.
Finding a home
He joined the military while still in college and graduated while stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana. While there, Sembroski met and married Erin Duncan, a Montana native.
After Sembroski left the service, the couple had to decide where to live. Erin loved the ocean and he loved the mountains, so in 2009 they moved to Washington where they could have both, he said. The couple lived in various cities and suburbs in King and Snohomish counties.
Erin and Chris Sembroski skiing at Snoqualmie Pass. Erin is a teacher at Goodman Middle School. Photo by Chris SembroskiIn the early 2020s, searching for a community in which to raise a family, Chris and Erin Sembroski ventured west across Puget Sound, working their way south from Bremerton. Sembroski remembers watching Erin get out of the car at a park in Gig Harbor. “I could instantly see my wife’s shoulders relax,” because she felt comfortable with the place, he said.
Gig Harbor became the Sembroskis’ home in 2022. At Christmastime, the town reminds him of “a Hallmark movie come to life,” with its decorations, tree lighting ceremony and other festivities.
By that time, Sembroski had been to space and back.
A raffle ticket to space
His connection to that transformative experience began unexpectedly, with a commercial that aired during Super Bowl LV on Feb. 7, 2021.
The ad introduced Inspiration4, a civilian space flight purchased from SpaceX by billionaire entrepreneur, pilot and philanthropist Jared Isaacman, and undertaken to raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Isaacman served as Inspiration4’s commander. He donated two of the four crew seats on the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft to St. Jude’s. The hospital chose physician assistant and childhood cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux to occupy one of them, and raffled off the other. Promotions for the contest included the memorable 30-second TV ad during the Super Bowl.
Sembroski recalls seeing that commercial, looking up Inspiration4 on his phone and clicking the link. He gambled on $50 worth of tickets and then promptly forgot about it.
In another part of the country, his old friend Hippchen, by then a jet captain for Endeavor Air airline, was entering the same contest on a larger scale, buying some $600 in raffle tickets.
Some weeks later, Sembroski received a phone call from Inspiration4 saying they were performing verification on a “deep pool of candidates” for the space flight.
The next day he was on Zoom with Jared Isaacman, and Hippchen showed up on the call. It turned out the pool of candidates was “a deep pool of one.” Hippchen had won the contest but did not meet the physical requirements for the flight. He was donating his seat to Sembroski.
“I was just struck dumb. In shock for a moment.”
More than just a weekend gig
At that time, the Sembroskis had two young children, and he had just started a new job with Lockheed Martin. They were living in Mukilteo. At first, Sembroski thought he could train for the flight using long weekends off from work.
But by July 2021 it became clear he needed to focus. Sembroski took a leave of absence from his employer and spent much of his time at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.
SpaceX provides much of the training equipment used by NASA, so the instruction received by Inspiration4 crew members mirrored that of the space agency’s astronauts, Sembroski said.
“I was absolutely geeking out,” he recalled.
The Inspiration4 spaceflight was from Sept. 16 through 18, 2021.
The experience changed Sembroski’s career focus, and his life mission. “After going to space, it could no longer be a hobby, it had to be a full-time passion,” he said.
Earth as seen from Inspiration4. Copyright Creative Commons license.Bringing space flight to the masses
Sembroski’s new job is Chief Astronaut for Titans Space Industries, an Orlando, Florida-based enterprise with the lofty goal of raising $1 billion in funding this year to advance its vision of affordable and efficient space access. It aims to draw the capital from ultra-high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors.
The funding, according to the company’s announcement last month, “will support the establishment of U.S.-based factories, facilities, and operations, focused on reusable spaceplane technology for Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) missions.”
The company “is going to truly make the dream of space flight for the masses come true,” Sembroski said.
“We are building infrastructure that will take us to the moon and beyond in a permanent, sustainable, and affordable way. Our Titans Spaceplane will be able to take over 300 people to space and experience hours on orbit at a price lower than today’s suborbital missions,” he said.
“Being able to take off and land on a runway allows the Titans Spaceplane to reduce the risk associated with large rockets and eliminate the need for specially built launchpads,” he said.
“I am not your traditional astronaut, and this is not your traditional space company!” Sembroski said.
Floating weightless and seeing the earth from outside the atmosphere is a “transformative experience” that will change those who experience it, and who will in turn come back and change the world, Sembroski said.https://www.gigharbornow.org/news/education/chris-sembroski-gig-harbors-astronaut-inspiration4/Association of Space Explorers @ASE_Astronauts 8:01 PM · Aug 28, 2025
#HappyBirthday to ASE member @ChrisSembroski, who flew to space in 2021 aboard @inspiration4x!
Pic: Inspiration4/@johnkrausphotos, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
https://twitter.com/ASE_Astronauts/status/1961127067719753988PR HORSE @PR_HORSE Last edited 4:36 AM · Feb 5, 2025
On @Reddit: @inspiration4x Astronaut @ChrisSembroski has transitioned from Blue Origin, pursuing role that allows for both “avionics engineering and space STEM influencer/educator” https://reddit.com/r/BlueOrigin/s/5Z2IWeiUac
https://twitter.com/PR_HORSE/status/1886982185561076002The Museum of Flight @museumofflight 4:06 AM · Apr 13, 2025
Astronaut Chris Sembroski now in the Space Chat Lounge. Yuri’s Night.
https://twitter.com/museumofflight/status/1911239601022521550
Wątek: ChS «Hanks» Sembroski - 28.08.1979 (Przeczytany 109 razy)