On September 15 the crew of Inspiration4 became the world’s first all-civilian human spaceflight mission to launch into orbit. But before they took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, their extensive training included a stop in Bucks County. Kenneth Chang covered the story for The New York Times.

To prepare for space flight, the four-person crew (two men; two women) spent six months pushing their bodies and their minds. They practiced in docking simulators, underwent hours of classroom instruction, flew in planes that simulated weightlessness, and acclimated to increased G’s.

That latter desensitization occurred at the National Aerospace Training and Research Center (NASTAR) in Southampton, Bucks County.

According to its website, NASTAR offers extensive human spaceflight training in:

• Orbital and suborbital spaceflights training programs
• Space physiology
• High-G loading in multi-axes
• High altitude and decompression
• Multiaxis accelerations

The NASTAR Center is the first FAA-approved center able to meet crew qualification and training requirements for commercial human spaceflight.

Jared Isaacman, mission commander, commented that the academics proved particularly difficult.

“It was a little bit of death by PowerPoint for a couple weeks,” he said. “But then it immediately went into kind of the more fun phase where now you’re taking all that knowledge that you’ve accumulated and you’re putting it to practical use.”

More on the training that prepped the Inspiration4 crew is at The New York Times.