CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – An American billionaire who made a fortune with technology and fighter jets buys a full SpaceX flight and plans to take three ‘regular’ people to travel the world this year.
In addition to fulfilling his dream of flying into space, Jared Isaacman announced on Monday that he plans to use the private trip to raise $ 200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, half of which is out of pocket coming.
A female health worker for St. Jude has already been selected for the mission. Anyone who donates to St. Jude in February will enter a random drawing for # 3 seat. The fourth seat will go to a business owner using Shift4 Payments, Isaacman’s credit card processing company in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“I really want us to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people jump in their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing around on the moon with their child in a space suit,” Isaacman, who turns 38 next week, told The Associated Press.
“I also think that if we start living in that world, we can better overcome childhood cancer along the way.”
He bought a Super Bowl ad to publicize the mission, called Inspiration4, intended for an October launch from Florida. The other passengers aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule – what Isaacman calls a diverse group “on the go” – will be announced next month. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk expects the flight to take two to four days.
Isaacman’s voyage is the latest deal announced for private space travel – and it’s number 1 on the runway for an orbital journey.
“This is an important milestone toward access to space for all,” Musk said at a news conference Monday from SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. While these initial private flights are expensive, they will cut costs over time, he noted.
Last week, a Houston company revealed the names of three businessmen who will each pay $ 55 million to fly aboard a SpaceX Dragon to the International Space Station in January. And a Japanese businessman has a deal with SpaceX to fly to the moon. In the past, space tourists had to hitchhike to the space station with Russian rockets.
Isaacman does not want to disclose how much he is paying SpaceX, other than to say that the expected donation to St. Jude “vastly exceeds the cost of the mission.”
While a former NASA astronaut will accompany the three businessmen, Isaacman will serve as his own space commander. The call, he said, teaches everything about SpaceX’s Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket. The capsules are designed to fly autonomously, but a pilot can override the system in an emergency.
A “space nerd” since kindergarten, Isaacman dropped out of high school when he was 16, obtained a GED certificate and started a business in his parents’ basement that became the origin of Shift4. He set a speed record in 2009 while raising money for the Make-A-Wish program and later founded Draken International, the world’s largest private jet fleet.
Isaacman’s $ 100 million pledge to St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest ever by one person and one of the largest in all.
“We pinch ourselves every day,” said Rick Shadyac, president of St. Jude’s fundraising organization.
In addition to SpaceX training, Isaacman plans to take his crew on a mountain expedition to recreate his most uncomfortable experience yet – tenting on the side of a mountain in bitter winter conditions.
“We will all get to know each other… very well before launch,” he said.
He is well aware of the need for things to go well.
“If something does go wrong, it will destroy the other’s ambition to become a commercial astronaut,” he told the AP over the weekend from his home in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Isaacman said he signed a contract with Musk’s company for being the clear leader in commercial space flights, having already completed two astronaut flights. Boeing has yet to fly astronauts to the space station for NASA. While Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin expect to fly with customers later this year, their craft will only skim the surface of space for a short time.
Isaacman had been putting out probes for space flights for years. He traveled to Kazakhstan in 2008 to watch a Russian Soyuz detonate with a tourist on board, and a few years later he attended one of the last launches of NASA’s space shuttle. SpaceX invited him to the company’s second astronaut launch for NASA in November.
While Isaacman and his wife, Monica, managed to stop his space journey over the months, their daughters couldn’t. The 7 and 4 year old girls overheard their parents talking about the flight last year and told their teachers, who called to ask if it was true that Father was an astronaut.
‘My wife said,’ No, of course not, you know how these kids make things up. But I mean, the reality is, my kids weren’t that far off with that. “
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The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.