Community Education

Chris Sembroski, Gig Harbor’s civilian astronaut, chases dream of space flight for the masses

Posted 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 Kenney

Sembroski, who will speak at the 30^th 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 Sembroski

In 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.