CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) – An American billionaire who has made a fortune in technology and fighter planes is buying an entire SpaceX flight and plans to take three “ordinary” people with him to tour 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 out of his own pockets.
A St. Jude health worker has already been selected for the mission. Anyone who makes a donation to St. Jude in February will enter a random drawing for seat # 3. The fourth seat will go to a businessman 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 are jumping on their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families jumping on the moon with their kids in a space suit,” Isaacman, who will be 38 next week, he told the Associated Press.
“I also think that if we are going to live in this world, it is better to beat childhood cancer along the way.”
He bought a Super Bowl ad to publicize the mission, dubbed Inspiration4 and planned for an October launch 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 chief executive Elon Musk expects the flight to last two to four days.
Isaacman’s trip is the last deal announced for private space travel – and it’s number 1 on the track for an orbital trip.
“This is an important milestone in allowing access to space for everyone,” said Musk during a news conference on 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 entrepreneurs who are paying $ 55 million each to fly to the International Space Station next January on board a SpaceX Dragon. And a Japanese businessman has an agreement with SpaceX to fly to the moon. In the past, space tourists had to hitchhike to the space station in Russian rockets.
Isaacman did not disclose how much he is paying SpaceX, except to say that the planned donation to St. Jude “far exceeds the cost of the mission”.
While a former NASA astronaut will accompany the three entrepreneurs, Isaacman will serve as commander of his own spaceship. The appeal, he said, is to learn all about SpaceX’s Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket. The capsules are designed to fly autonomously, but a pilot can cancel the system in an emergency.
A “space geek” since kindergarten, Isaacman left school when he was 16, got a GED certificate and opened a business in his parents’ basement that became the genesis of Shift4. He set a flying speed record around the world in 2009 while raising money for the Make-A-Wish program and later established Draken International, the world’s largest private fighter fleet.
Isaacman’s $ 100 million pledge to St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest ever made by a single individual and one of the largest overall.
“We are pinching ourselves every day,” said Rick Shadyac, president of St. Jude’s fundraiser.
In addition to SpaceX training, Isaacman plans to take his crew on a mountain expedition to emulate his most uncomfortable experience yet – camping on a mountainside in harsh 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 undermine anyone else’s ambition to become a commercial astronaut,” he told AP over the weekend from his home in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Isaacman said he signed with Musk’s company because he is the absolute leader in commercial space flights, with two astronaut flights already completed. Boeing has not yet taken astronauts to NASA’s space station. While Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin hope to start flying with customers later this year, their ships will only briefly glide across the surface of space.
Isaacman had been launching space flight antennas for years. He traveled to Kazakhstan in 2008 to see a Russian Soyuz take off with a tourist on board. A few years later, he attended one of NASA’s latest space shuttle launches. SpaceX invited him to the company’s second NASA astronaut launch in November.
While Isaacman and his wife, Monica, managed to keep their space travel a secret over the months, their daughters failed. The girls, aged 7 and 4, overheard their parents discussing last year’s flight and told the 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 want to say that the reality is that my children were not that far from it. “
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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. The AP is solely responsible for all content.