An American billionaire who has made a fortune in technology and fighter jets is buying an entire SpaceX flight and plans to take three people with him to orbit the globe this year.
In addition to fulfilling his dream of flying in space, Jared Isaacman announced Monday that he plans to use the private trip to raise $ 200 million for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, half of which came from his own pockets.
A medical worker in St Jude has already been selected for the mission. Anyone who donates to St. Jude in February will be entered into a random draw for third place. Fourth place will go to a business owner who uses Shift4 Payments, the Isaacman credit card processing company in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“I really want to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people jump on their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families jumping on the moon with their baby in a space suit,” Isaacman, who turns 38 years next week, he told the Associated Press.
“I also think that if we live in that world, we’d better conquer childhood cancer along the way.”
He bought an advertisement for the Super Bowl to make the mission public, called Inspiration4 and aimed for October. Details about the trip to a Dragon SpaceX capsule are still being worked out, including the number of days the four will be in orbit after leaving Florida. The other passengers will be announced next month.
Isaacman’s Journey is the latest announcement of private space travel. Three businessmen are paying $ 55 million each to fly to the International Space Station in January next year aboard a SpaceX Dragon. And a Japanese businessman has an agreement with SpaceX to fly to the moon in a few years.
Isaacman would not disclose how much SpaceX pays, except that he said the advance donation to St. Jude “far exceeds the cost of the mission.”
While a former NASA astronaut will accompany the three businessmen, Isaacman will serve as his own spaceship commander. The call, he said, is to learn all about the Dragon SpaceX and Falcon 9 rockets. While the capsules are designed to fly autonomously, a pilot can overwrite the system in an emergency.
A “space geek” in kindergarten, Isaacman dropped out of high school when he was 16, got a GED certificate, and started a business in his parents’ basement that became the genesis for Shift4. He set a world speed record in 2009 while raising money for the Make-A-Wish program and later founded Draken International, the world’s largest private fleet of fighter jets.
Isaacman’s $ 100 million commitment to St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest ever by a single person and one of the largest in the world.
“We pinch every day,” said Rick Shadyac, president of the St. Jude fundraising organization.
In addition to training SpaceX, Isaacman plans to take his crew on a mountain expedition to mimic his most uncomfortable experience to date – to make tents on the side of a mountain in bitter winter conditions.
“We will all know each other … very well before the launch,” he said.
He is extremely aware of the need for things to go well.
“If something goes wrong, it will hinder everyone’s ambition to go and become a commercial astronaut,” he said of his home in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Isaacman said he signed with Elon Musk’s company because he is the clear leader in commercial spaceflight, with two astronaut flights already completed. Boeing has not yet led astronauts to the NASA space station. While Virgin Galactic from Richard Branson and Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos expect customers to start flying later this year, their boats will briefly cover the surface of the space.
Isaacman had been probing spaceflight for years. He traveled to Kazakhstan in 2008 to see a Russian Soyuz explode with a tourist on board, then a few years later participated in one of the last launches of NASA’s space shuttle. SpaceX invited him to launch the company’s second astronaut for NASA in November.
While Isaacman and his wife, Monica, managed to keep their space trip for a few months, their daughters could not. The girls, aged seven and four, heard their parents talking about the flight last year and told the teachers, who called to ask if it was true that the father was an astronaut.
“My wife said, ‘No, of course not, you know how these kids make it up.’ But I mean, the reality is, my kids weren’t that far off, ”Isaacman said.