CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) – An American billionaire who has earned a fortune in technology and fighter jets is buying an entire SpaceX flight and plans to take three “everyday” 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. John’s Children’s Research Hospital. Jude, half from his own pockets.
A medical worker for St. Jude has already been selected for the mission. Anyone who donates to St. Jude in February will be introduced in a random draw for 3rd place.
“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 a Super Bowl ad to make the mission public, called Inspiration4, and aimed to launch it in October in Florida. The other passengers aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule – what Isaacman calls a diverse group of “everyday life” – will be announced next month. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk expects the flight to last two to four days.
Isaacman’s Journey is the latest announced offer for private space travel – and is number 1 on the runway for an orbital journey.
“This is an important step in allowing access to space for everyone,” Musk told a news conference Monday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Although expensive, these initial private flights will reduce costs over time, he noted.
Last week, a Houston company revealed the names of three businessmen who pay $ 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 the past, space tourists had to go to the space station on Russian missiles.
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 Space SpaceX and Falcon 9 rockets. The capsules are designed to fly autonomously, but 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. Jemp in Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest ever by a single person and one of the largest overall.
“We pinch every day,” said Rick Shadyac, president of the St. Louis fundraising organization. Jude.
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 anyone else’s ambition to go and become a commercial astronaut,” he told the AP over the weekend at his home in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Isaacman said he signed with 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 the NASA spacecraft. SpaceX invited him to launch the company’s second astronaut for NASA in November.
While Isaacman and his wife, Monica, managed to maintain their space travel over the months, their daughters could not. The girls, aged 7 and 4, heard their parents talking about the flight last year and told their 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. ”
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. AP is solely responsible for all content.