A U.S. billionaire who made a fortune on fighter jets and technology is buying an entire SpaceX flight and plans to take three people with him around the world this year.
In addition to fulfilling his dream of flying into space, Jared Isaacman announced Monday that he intended to use the private trip to raise $ 200 million for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, half of his pockets.
A St Jude health worker has already been selected for the mission. Anyone who makes a donation to St Jude in February will take part in a random draw for seat number three. The fourth seat will be for 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 on their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing off the moon with their son in a space suit,” Isaacman, who turns 38 years next week, he told The Associated Press.
“I also think that if we’re going to live in this world, it’s better that we conquer childhood cancer along the way.”
He has bought a Super Bowl ad to publicize the mission, dubbed Inspiration4 and slated for October. Details of the trip are still being worked on in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, including the number of days the four will be in orbit after leaving Florida. The rest of the passengers will be announced next month.
Isaac’s Journey is the latest private space travel ad. Three businessmen pay $ 55 million to fly to the International Space Station next January aboard a SpaceX Dragon. And a Japanese entrepreneur has a deal with SpaceX to fly to the moon in a few years.
Isaacman would not reveal how much SpaceX is paying, 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 businessmen, Isaacman will serve as commander of his own spacecraft. The attraction, he said, is learning all about the SpaceX’s Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket. While the capsules are designed to fly autonomously, a pilot can override the system in an emergency.
A “space geek” from 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 of Shift4. He set a flying speed record around the world in 2009 while raising money for the Make-A-Wish program, and later set Draken International, the world’s largest private fleet of fighter jets.
Isaacman’s $ 100 million commitment to St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest one person has ever made and one of the largest overall.
“We pinch ourselves every day,” said Rick Shadyac, president of the St. Jude fundraising organization.
In addition to the SpaceX training, Isaacman intends to take his crew on a mountain expedition to mimic his most uncomfortable experience to date: tenting next to a mountain in bitter winter conditions.
“We’ll all get to know each other … very well before the release,” he said.
He is very aware of the need for things to go well.
“If something goes wrong, it will delay anyone else’s ambition to go on to become a commercial astronaut,” he said from his home in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Isaacman said he signed with the company of Elon Musk because he is the leading leader in commercial spaceflight, with two astronaut flights already completed. Boeing has not yet flown astronauts on the space station for NASA. While Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos ’Blue Origin are expected to start flying customers later this year, their vessel will only briefly skim the surface of the space.
Isaacman had been doing space flight probes for years. He traveled to Kazakhstan in 2008 to see a Russian Soyuz explode with a tourist on board, and a few years later witnessed 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 maintain their space travel for months, their daughters were unable to. The girls, aged seven and four, overheard their parents discussing 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 invent it. ’But I mean the reality is that my kids weren’t that far away with that,” Isaacman said.