For His Second Trip to Space, Billionaire Has Grander, Riskier Aspirations
The New York Times
Jared Isaacman is leading three other privately trained astronauts on a SpaceX vehicle for Polaris Dawn, a mission that will include a daring spacewalk.
Three years ago, a billionaire entrepreneur named Jared Isaacman made a groundbreaking trip to space. That spaceflight, which Mr. Isaacman called Inspiration4, was the first to orbit the Earth without a professional astronaut aboard.
In the coming days, Mr. Isaacman, the founder and chief executive of Shift4, a payment processing company, is planning to head into space again. This time the itinerary is longer, more daring and riskier, and includes a spacewalk, the first by private astronauts.
The mission, named Polaris Dawn, hearkens back to the earliest era of spaceflight, the 1960s, when pioneers like Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union and John Glenn of NASA pushed the boundaries of what had been accomplished in space, learning how to survive and operate in an airless and weightless environment.
But unlike those expeditions, undertaken by national space agencies, this is a purely commercial effort. For Polaris Dawn, Mr. Isaacman is collaborating closely with Elon Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, to start laying the foundations for Mr. Musk’s dream of someday sending people to Mars.
“There’s always a risk calculus to it,” Mr. Isaacman said in an interview a week and a half ago, before he and his three crewmates headed to Florida for the launch. “But the real focus is on what we stand to gain and learn from it. And in this case, we’ve got some pretty cool things.”
Most astronaut missions these days are almost boringly routine, basically taxi rides ferrying people to and from an orbiting space station.
