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Billionaire Jared Isaacman has purchased seats on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to launch himself, a healthcare worker and two others – who will be selected by lottery – into orbit in late 2021.
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The mission, called Inspiration4, will be the first to fly a crew of people who aren’t professional astronauts into space.
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“The risk is not zero,” said SpaceX founder Elon Musk, but it is a big step forward in making spaceflight affordable and accessible.
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SpaceX is planning a one-of-a-kind space flight for the end of this year: launching a crew of people who aren’t professional astronauts into Earth orbit.
The mission is called Inspiration4. SpaceX announced Monday that it is targeting the fourth quarter of 2021 for launch, after 37-year-old billionaire Jared Isaacman purchased a four-person flight aboard the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Isaacman founded the payment processing company Shift4 Payments in 1999 and in 2011 co-founded Draken International, which has a large fleet of fighter jets and trains pilots for the US military. Although he claims to have spent over 6,000 hours piloting jets and old military planes, he has never been to space. The three people he plans to place in the other Dragon seats don’t either.
This will make Inspiration4 the first mission in history to pilot a fully private commercial crew.
“This is an important step towards access to space for all,” Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002, said in a call to reporters Monday. “Because at first things are very expensive, and only through missions like this are we able to cut costs over time and make space accessible to everyone. “
Isaacman has already selected his first crew member: an anonymous 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 fundraiser that will help select the second crew member. This individual will be chosen from a month-long raffle to raise $ 100 million for childhood cancer research in St. Jude, in addition to a $ 100 million donation from Isaacman.
“If we are to continue to make progress up there in space, then we have an obligation to do the same here on Earth,” Isaacman said on the call.
The third Inspiration4 seat will go to an entrepreneur who sets up an online store for their business using Isaacman’s e-commerce service, Shift4Shop.
Eligibility requirements include being 18 years of age or older and being a U.S. resident. Potential crew members will also undergo a basic medical exam, Musk said.
“If you can do a roller coaster ride, like an intense roller coaster ride, you should be fine to fly on Dragon,” he added.
Crew selections are due to be announced by the end of February. Then the crew will immediately begin SpaceX’s astronaut training program, with Isaacman making a few additions inspired by his mountaineering experience.
“I plan to take four people in a tent that I can attest to is absolutely smaller than the Dragon spaceship, up a mountain when it snows, and present everyone with really stressful situations. “Isaacman said. “We’re all going to know each other incredibly long before we get hooked on Dragon.”
“ Pioneers ” of a new era of private space exploration
SpaceX launched the very first commercial spaceflight in May 2020, propelling NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station for a demonstration mission called Demo-2.
After the Dragon crew 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 contracted from the company. .
The Crew-1 mission launched SpaceX’s first full crew of four astronauts in November, aboard a Dragon capsule named Resilience, which remains attached 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 where there’s a crew on board makes me nervous,” Musk told NBC News’s Tom Costello in an interview that aired Monday. “The risk is not zero.”
“When you have a whole new mode of transportation, you have to have pioneers,” he added.
Inspiration4 is scheduled to be launched aboard a Falcon 9 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket should push the capsule into Earth’s orbit, where it will orbit at any altitude Isaacman wants, for as long as he wants.
“Where do you want to go? We’ll take you there,” Musk told him on Monday’s call, adding, “You can change your mind too.”
For now, the plan is to orbit at the ISS altitude of about 400 kilometers for two to four days, according to Isaacman and Musk. It is not yet known what they will do with their time in space. Isaacman said it would involve “some experimentation” for research institutes like St. Jude, but declined to give more details.
“We will be releasing details in the near future on the payload and the experiments we hope to incorporate,” he said.
Through missions like these, Musk hopes the cost of spaceflight with SpaceX will drop “exponentially” over time, as they will help fund the development of his company’s Starship-Super Heavy launch system. SpaceX designs and tests prototypes of this future system at its facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. Musk wants the final launch system – which can stand 120 meters (394 feet) high – to be fully reusable.
If that works, Starship could reduce the cost of reaching space by roughly 1,000 times, circling the hypersonic world on Earth, and flying astronauts to the moon. Musk’s ultimate plan is to build 1,000 spaceships, use them to transport people and cargo to Mars, and build an independent, self-sufficient city there.
“The key to being affordable for everyone is full and fast reusability, so that would be with the Starship program,” he said.
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