WHAT’S BEING CLAIMED:
- Jared Isaacman is a tech billionaire who will lead the crew in an all-civilian outer space mission through the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
- The mission is called “Inspiration 4,” set in October this year.
- Part of the mission includes raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital intended for its noble health causes.
Not only is Jared Isaacman a billionaire CEO — he is also a trained jet pilot who is now pioneering an all-civilian outer space mission through the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft!
The mission, called Inspiration 4, is tentatively set in October this year. Per the Associated Press, details of the flight plan are to be announced later.
Isaacman, 37, is the founder and CEO of Pennsylvania-based Shift4 Payments. He purchased the flight from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, sharing the same vision as Musk’s: humanity’s future beyond earth, orbiting outer space like it’s a regular thing.
“I truly want us to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people are jumping in their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing around on the moon with their kid in a spacesuit,” Isaacman told the AP.
Not only that, part of the mission also includes raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital intended for its noble health causes. In fact, Isaacman made a $100 million-worth of donations to St. Jude Children’s Hospital, which, according to him, “vastly exceeds the cost of the mission.”
What’s more, the seemingly sophisticated mission has an interesting twist — those who will be donating for the benefit of St. Jude’s charity will have a chance to win a SpaceX seat and fly outside space.
To widely let people know about this mission, the billionaire CEO is buying air time for a Super Bowl commercial, with high hopes that more will engage in the project, to raise the $200 million for St. Jude.
The mission’s website states that a total of four civilian space fliers will “leave Earth from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Complex 39A, the embarkation point for Apollo and Space Shuttle missions, and travel across a low earth orbit on a multi-day journey that will continually eclipse more than 90% of the earth’s population.”
SpaceX’s crew is set to be announced in March. They will all receive proper astronaut trainings, emergency preparedness, space craft ingress and egress exercises, and other important space simulations, care of SpaceX.
According to Musk, the mission is “an important milestone toward enabling access to space for everyone.”
Source: PEOPLE.com
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