A billionaire from the United States who has made a fortune from technology and fighter jets buys an entire SpaceX flight and plans to take three people to travel the world this year.
In addition to fulfilling his dream of flying into space, Jared Isaacman announced on Monday that he planned to use the private trip to raise $ 200 million for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, half of which came from his own pocket .
A 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 seat number three. The fourth seat goes to a business owner who uses 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, for October. Details of the ride in a SpaceX Dragon capsule are still being worked out, including the number of days the four will be in orbit after launching from Florida. The other passengers will be announced next month.
Isaacman’s voyage is the latest announcement of private space travel. Three businessmen 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 a few years.
Isaacman would not reveal how much he is paying SpaceX, except 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. Although the capsules are designed to fly autonomously, 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 commitment to St Jude in Memphis, Tennessee is the largest ever by one person and one of the largest in all.
“We squeeze ourselves every day,” said Rick Shadyac, president of the St. Jude 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 goes wrong, it will destroy the other’s ambition to become a commercial astronaut,” he said from his home in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Isaacman said he signed a contract with Elon Musk’s company because it is 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, were able to keep his space journey quiet for months, their daughters couldn’t. The seven- and four-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 Dad 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,” Isaacman said.