Slated to launch on Wednesday as part of the Polaris dawn Mission heralded by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Billionaire Jared Isaacman is bracing for his second space journey in three long years. As reported by the New York Post, departing from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the 41-year-old billionaire is part of a four-member crew that will travel farther from Earth than any other previous space tourist in Spacex Crew Dragon Capsule. Isaacman will become the first private citizen to embark on a “spacewalk”.
SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gills will be joining Isaacman on the Polaris Dawn mission. This marks the first time that employees from the company will participate in an orbital mission. Aiming to achieve the highest orbit for a crewed mission, following the launch, the team is anticipated to enter an elliptical orbit that extends up to 1,4000 kilometers from Earth. Menon and Gills will become the first women to embark on such a journey.
Four-member SpaceX Crew Capsule Mission
The Polaris mission is expected to last for five days.
Let’s take a look at the life of the billionaire Hared Isaacman who is all set to become the first private citizen to venture into a spacewalk mission.
The founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, a company that provides point-of-sale software and payment processing services to businesses, Jared Isaacman’s net worth is estimated at around $1.9 billion by Forbes. The billionaire, who is 41 years old, is a trained pilot and has an extraordinary background in aviation. He learned to fly fighter jets and finished a record-setting flight around the world in 61 hours, 51 minutes, and 15 seconds, which won him a record. Furthermore, Isaacman also co-founded Draken International, which trains Aiforce pilots and houses the world’s largest private fleet of jets. In 2019, Isaacman sold his majority stake in Draken to Blackstone for a nine-figure sum, becoming a billionaire the following year when Shift4 Payments went public.
Now, Isaacman is gearing up for his second space journey, this time on board a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. This mission stands out as the first of the three Polaris missions planned, funded, and engineered by Isaacman in collaboration with SpaceX. Isaacman’s first spaceflight was in 2021, during the self-funded Inspiration4 mission, also launched by SpaceX.
The Polaris Dawn Mission, spearheaded by Jared Issacman and his team, aims to journey farther from Earth than any space mission since NASA’s Apollo program. The mission focuses on studying radiation exposure and gathering data for lunar and Martian explorations in the future. On the third day of the mission, Isaacman and Sarah Gills will execute a spacewalk-like maneuver by unlatching the hatch of their SpaceX crew Dragon Capsule and leaning out while being fastened, spending approximately 15 minutes outside to examine spacesuits. The crew will fly through the Van Allen radiation belts and test the possibility of X-ray imaging in space in the absence of any traditional equipment.
The launch is slated to occur between 3:38 and 7:09 am ET on Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. A helium leak issue with the rocket’s ground equipment has caused the delay.
