by Jeff Foust — October 6, 2021 The Inspiration4 crew of (from left) Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux pose with their Crew Dragon spacecraft ahead of their mid-September launch. Credit: Inspiration4 Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space is something of a throwback to the early days of spaceflight when NASA’s Mercury 7 astronauts traded special access for glowing, sanitized coverage. Credit: Netflix
A new era of commercial human spaceflight means a new era in media relations — and also, perhaps, a return to the earliest days of the Space Age. When Blue Origin conducted its first crewed New Shepard suborbital flight in July, Jeff Bezos and crewmates performed a handful of television interviews the day before the flight and immediately after landing. But, at a post-flight event billed to attending journalists as a press conference, he took questions from just three reporters before moving on. Virgin Galactic, at its flight earlier that month, did take more questions from reporters during a half-hour press conference after its SpaceShipTwo flight. However, it kept journalists at a distance from other attendees earlier in the morning at Spaceport America, even going as far as having a security guard shoo away any guests who had wandered over to the fence separating them from the media section to willingly chat with reporters.
Inspiration4, the private orbital crewed spaceflight on a SpaceX Crew Dragon last month, had its own approach to media. There were a few media briefings between the time the mission was announced in February and the launch in September, although some reporters complained they couldn’t get access to the phone line for the final briefing the day before launch. However, the project invested more in special arrangements with specific outlets. Shortly after the announcement of Inspiration4, Time revealed it had secured the “competitive documentary rights” to the mission , giving it “exclusive access to the groundbreaking mission.”
While Time featured Inspiration4 in a cover story in August, the culmination of that effort was Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission to Space, a documentary series available on Netflix. The five-part series follows the mission from Jared Isaacman’s announcement of the mission and select of the three people who fly with him through training. The final episode, released last week, covers the mission itself, from final preparations for launch through splashdown.