Can four people who've never been to space before spend three days spinning around Earth after only a few months of training?

That's the challenge SpaceX has set for itself when it launches its first tourism mission on Wednesday, the first time a crew of exclusively private citizens will orbit our planet.

A five-hour launch window for "Inspiration4" opens from 8:02 pm (0002 GMT Thursday).

A Falcon 9 rocket, with a Dragon capsule at its top, will blast off from the legendary launch complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Center in Florida, from where the Apollo 11 mission took off for the Moon.

The spaceship's trajectory will take it to an altitude of 575 kilometers (357 miles), deeper into space than the International Space Station (ISS).

SpaceX is set to launch four people into space Wednesday on a three-day mission that is the first to orbit the Earth with exclusively private citizens on board.

Here are the key facts about Inspiration4.

The spacecraft

At the top of the Falcon 9 rocket, which is 70 meters high, sits the Dragon capsule, where the crew will be.

This spacecraft has already taken 10 astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on three separate missions.

The Dragon capsule, eight meters high and four meters wide, has been modified for this flight. A huge glass dome has been installed to offer passengers a 360-degree view of space.

The flight schedule

Take-off is scheduled on Wednesday beginning at 8:02 pm (0002 GMT Thursday) from the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A Russian Soyuz rocket has blasted into space carrying 34 new satellites from British operator Oneweb, which aims to provide broadband internet everywhere in the world.

The rocket, operated by Europe's Arianespace, took off at 1807 GMT Tuesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, broadcast live by the Russian Roscosmos space agency.

"The launch went to plan," Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin said on Telegram.

It was the sixth launch of OneWeb satellites this year, the last one having been on August 22.

OneWeb is working to complete the construction of a constellation of low-earth orbit satellites providing enhanced broadband and other services to countries worldwide.

The company is competing against billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in the race to provide fast internet for the world's remote areas via satellites.

The UK company plans for its global commercial internet service to be operational by next year, supported by some 650 satellites.

Arianespace, which has worked with Russia for close to two decades, is under contract to make 16 Soyuz launches between December 2020 and the end of 2022.

A two-stage suborbital sounding rocket launched at 6:07 p.m. EDT for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration from NASA's launch range at Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

The Terrier-Improved Malemute rocket flew the payload to an altitude of 99 miles. The payload descended by parachute and landed in the Atlantic Ocean, 59 miles from Wallops Island. The payload was recovered and preliminary indications are that good data was received.

The flight is part of the HOTShot program, short for High Operational Tempo, which collects scientific data that benefits aerospace research and informs future weapon designs for the U.S. nuclear enterprise. Its non-nuclear scientific experiments evaluate prototypes and help develop high-fidelity computer models and mechanical flight simulators.

The next rocket launch from Wallops is targeted for no earlier than October 2021.