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Billionaire Jared Isaacman bought seats on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to launch himself, a healthcare professional and two others – to be selected by lot – in orbit in late 2021.
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The mission, called Inspiration4, will be the first to take a crew of people who are not professional astronauts into space.
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“The risk is not zero,” said SpaceX founder Elon Musk, but this is a big step towards making space flight accessible and accessible.
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SpaceX is planning an unprecedented space flight later this year: the launch of a crew of people who are not professional astronauts in Earth orbit.
The mission is called Inspiration4. SpaceX announced on Monday that it is targeting the launch of the fourth quarter of 2021 after billionaire Jared Isaacman, 37, purchased a flight for four on board the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Isaacman founded the payment processing company Shift4 Payments in 1999 and, in 2011, he co-founded Draken International, which has a large fleet of fighters and trains pilots for the U.S. Army. Although he says he spent more than 6,000 hours flying in jets and ex-military aircraft, he was never in space. Neither do the three people he plans to place in the Dragon’s other seats.
This will make Inspiration4 the first mission in history to fly with an entirely private commercial crew.
“This is an important milestone in allowing access to space for everyone,” said Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, in a conference call with reporters on Monday. “Because at the beginning things are very expensive, and it is only through missions like this that we are able to reduce the cost over time and make the space accessible to everyone.”
Isaacman has already selected his first crew member: an unidentified woman who works in the healthcare field. She will serve as an “ambassador” for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which is benefiting from a fundraising effort that will help select the second crew member. That person will be chosen in a one-month drawing to raise $ 100 million for child cancer research in St. Jude, in addition to a $ 100 million donation from Isaacman.
“If we are going to continue advancing there in space, we have an obligation to do the same here on Earth,” said Isaacman during the call.
The third place in Inspiration4 will go to a businessman who creates an online store for his business using the e-commerce service from Isaacman’s company, Shift4Shop.
Eligibility requirements include being 18 years of age or older and resident in the USA. Potential crew members will also undergo a basic medical examination, said Musk.
“If you can do a roller coaster ride, like an intense roller coaster ride, you should be fine to fly the Dragon,” he added.
Crew selections are expected to be announced by the end of February. Then, the crew will immediately begin SpaceX’s astronaut training program, with Isaacman making some additions inspired by his experience in mountaineering.
“I intend to put four people in a tent that I can attest to being absolutely smaller than the Dragon spacecraft, on a mountain when it is snowing, and present everyone with some really stressful situations,” said Isaacman. “We are all going to get to know each other incredibly well before we tie ourselves up to Dragon.”
‘Pioneers’ of a new era of private space exploration
SpaceX launched its first commercial space flight in May 2020, launching NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station on a demonstration mission called Demo-2.
After Crew Dragon safely returned Behnken and Hurley to Earth, parachuting them into the Gulf of Mexico two months after their launch, SpaceX began the first of six ISS rotation missions that NASA hired from the company.
The Crew-1 mission launched the first full SpaceX crew of four astronauts in November, aboard a Dragon capsule called Resilience, which remains connected to the ISS until the astronauts return in the spring.
This is the spacecraft SpaceX plans to give Isaacman for his mission later this year.
“Any mission that has a crew on board makes me nervous,” Musk told Tom Costello of NBC News in an interview that aired on Monday. “The risk is not zero.”
“When you have a whole new mode of transportation, you need pioneers,” he added.
Inspiration4 is scheduled to launch aboard a Falcon 9 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket must push the capsule into Earth orbit, where it will orbit at any altitude that Isaacman wants, for as long as Isaacman wants.
“Where do you want to go? We’ll take you there,” Musk told him during Monday’s call, adding, “You can change your mind too.”
For now, the plan is to orbit at the ISS altitude of about 250 miles (400 kilometers) for two to four days, according to Isaacman and Musk. It is not yet clear what they will do with their time in space. Isaacman said it would involve “some experiments” for research institutions like St. Jude, but did not elaborate.
“We will release details in the near future regarding the payload and the experiments we hope to bring on board,” he said.
Through missions like these, Musk expects the cost of space flight with SpaceX to drop “exponentially” over time, as they will help finance the development of his company’s Starship-Super Heavy launch system. SpaceX is designing and testing prototypes of this future system at its facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. Musk wants the final launch system – which can be 120 meters (394 feet) high – to be completely reusable.
If it works, Starship can cut the cost of reaching space by about 1,000 times, travel hypersonically around the world and take astronauts to the moon. Musk’s final plan is to build 1,000 starships, use them to transport people and cargo to Mars, and build an independent, self-sustaining city there.
“The key to being accessible to everyone is total and quick reuse, so it would be with the Starship program,” he said.
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