Jared Isaacman Acquires Three More SpaceX Missions

Last year, Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX sent a team of 4, all civilians, into space, and the team, traveling in Earth’s orbit, successfully returned to Earth after a three-day journey.

However, it seems that billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is part of this team, is planning to go into space once again with SpaceX. The 39-year-old billionaire announced that he has purchased three additional flights, this time with SpaceX, a series of missions called “Polaris” that will go deeper into space.

‘The furthest point humans have traveled in space since they set foot on the Moon’

Isaacman, owner of payments processing company Shift4 Payments, said last year It had funded the entire SpaceX Crew Dragon passenger mission, named Inspiration4, and filled the other three seats on the spacecraft with an all-civilian crew, including a cancer survivor, an engineer, and a professor. After a short training, the civilian crew went into space, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital on a three-day trip into space to raise money.

However, it seems that once he has tasted space, Isaacman’s space adventure has only just begun. The three flights Isaacman has purchased include two missions on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon that involve flying into super-high orbits that will eventually lead to the first crewed flight on the company’s massive new Starship rocket. Isaacman, who will fly on his first Crew Dragon journey called ‘Polaris Dawn’, will be accompanied by two SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon and a former Air Force pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who is the mission director of Inspiration4. With this flight, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is aimed to collect donations once again.

If the flight is successful, the Crew Dragon capsule will have reached its highest altitude ever. In fact, in a statement to the Today Show, Isaacman claims that with the Polaris Dawn flight, people will go to the furthest point in space they have gone since they last set foot on the Moon.

Manned deep space travel will be tested with Crew Dragon flights

The main purpose of Crew Dragon, which has only been to low Earth orbit so far, is International Space for NASA. Carry astronauts and cargo to the station. SpaceX transported its first crew of NASA astronauts in May 2020, followed by a handful of other crews over the past few years. The company, which started to branch out by performing its first fully private mission with Inspiration4, now plans to launch a series of special missions to the International Space Station for Axiom company.

Additionally, Crew Dragon flights are intended to serve as lead missions to test deep space human travel with SpaceX. A new spacesuit specially designed for use in the Polaris Dawn mission, which includes a spacewalk that will be the first commercial spacewalk ever performed, is also being prepared.

On the other hand, the flight will also test the “laser-based communication in space” of Starlink, the massive satellite constellation the company is building to provide global broadband coverage. The mission will test how the crew manages a deeper space environment as the four-man crew traverses the Van Allen Belt, a region of radiating particles trapped in Earth’s magnetic field and extending into deep space.

Polaris Dawn mission launch will take place in the last quarter of this year

However, Isaacman will have to wait for a while to go back into space. With the spacecraft Starship, which is still under development, SpaceX has made several high-altitude flights during 2020 and 2021; The Starship had only been successful once in these tests in landing without exploding. In addition, for test flights in orbit, the Federal Aviation Administration must give SpaceX approval for the launch of the company’s Starship, which is expected to be decided at the end of the month.

Of course, even if SpaceX is able to launch Starship into orbit this year, the company still has a lot of work to do before taking humans into deep space. First of all, the company needs to develop life support systems, figure out how to fuel the vehicle in space, and prove that it can land humans back on Earth after returning from deep space. The launch of the Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2022.