The last time Jared Isaacman went to space, he chose to go up with a crew of three people, who had no prior spaceflight experience. This time, the founder of payment services company Shift4 is taking an even bigger risk.
Isaacman will help fund and join the Polaris Dawn flight from SpaceX, which will take the crew higher than anyone has gone since the 1970s, entering the Van Allen radiation belts 870 miles above the earth (and about 185 miles higher than the International Space Station). That same flight will see the billionaire and other crew members take part in a spacewalk, connected to the spacecraft with only a tether keeping him attached and a hose feeding him oxygen. They will be the first private citizens to do a spacewalk in history.
That journey will be made in a new type of spacesuit (technically called an Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) suit), which SpaceX designed and developed in just two and a half years.
SpaceX is targeting an Aug. 26 launch date for the mission, which is scheduled to last five days. Joining Isaacman, who will command the mission, are pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Isaacman’s friend and a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, along with SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both of whom will act as mission specialists.
This is the first of three planned missions in the Polaris program, all of which Isaacman will command and help fund. The spacewalk is the highlight of this journey, however.
“Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require thousands of spacesuits; the development of this suit and the execution of the EVA will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions,” SpaceX said on the mission’s Webpage.