by WASHINGTON – By the end of the year, Hayley Arceneaux will be the youngest American in space and one of the first tourists to enter orbit unaccompanied by professional astronauts.
It is a feat made all the more remarkable by her battle to overcome a childhood cancer that robbed the 29 year old of her dream of becoming an astronaut herself.
Due to the bone cancer she overcame, Arceneaux has steel rods in her left leg — which until recently were enough to shatter her hopes of going into space.
Enter Jared Isaacman, a young American billionaire with a passion for space exploration who chartered a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at his own expense and decided to take three people with him, including Arceneaux.
Arceneaux said she hopes to be an inspiration with “this precedent that it’s going to set and what it’s going to show these other kids going through cancer treatment.”
The first person chosen for this unprecedented mission, named Inspiration4 and set to take off at the end of 2021, was in fact Arceneaux.
The young woman was treated as a child at St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, which specialises in childhood diseases, including cancer.
Isaacman hopes to raise $200-million for the hospital on his space mission.
“I got a phone call pretty much out of the blue in early January, and it was from St Jude… They basically said, ‘Do you want to go to space?'” Arceneaux told AFP.
“Immediately I said, ‘Yes, yes, absolutely!'” said Arceneaux, who now works for the same hospital that cared for her, as a medical assistant.
As a child, she visited the NASA space center in Houston, Texas. “Of course, I wanted to be an astronaut,” she said. “But then a few months later I was diagnosed with cancer, and it really changed my whole world.”
“Until now, astronauts have had to really be physically perfect, which is not a category that I fall into because of surgeries I’ve had on my leg. And that’s one thing I’m so excited about with this mission, it is opening space travel up to anyone,” Arceneaux said.
